to the memory of the men of God who thirteen
centuries ago first
took the gospel to China - "the missionaries who traveled on foot,
sandals on their feet, a staff in their hands, a basket on their backs,
and in the basket the Holy Scriptures and the cross. They went over
deep rivers and high mountains, thousands of miles, and on the way,
meeting many nations, they preached to them the gospel of Christ."

FROM AN ANCIENT TEXT.

AND DEDICATED

to one who "also serves" in a thousand ways
with her faithful help - my wife.

A restoration of the original silk
painting of a
missionary bishop of the Church of the East, now in the British Museum,
London, discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at Tun-huang, western China, in
1908. It had been found, along with many manuscripts including some
Christian ones, in a cave sealed in 1036. This restoration was painted
by Robert MacGregor.

PREFACE

A gospel-preaching church with 1,300 years of
missionary experience
deserves our attention. It is the purpose of this book to focus on that
great missionary effort. Only a part of the story, however, of the
Church of the East's missionary enterprise, from the second century to
the end of the fourteenth, can be told here. The main focus will be the
mission to China during the last 800 years of that period.

Research materials for writing on this subject are
available,
although they are scattered over half the earth and are in various
languages. Little, however, is written for the reader who is not
pursuing advanced studies. English speaking Christians have been
interested in the western expansion of Christianity--in history that
involves their own origin and development - and little is accessible to
them concerning the amazing missionary effort of the Church of the
East. That the gospel of Christ's kingdom did confront the masses of
Asia long ago, when the world's population was the densest there and
civilization the most advanced, is today little appreciated by western
Christians. How it fared in that confrontation is almost totally
unknown.

The result is that when someone asks, "Where was the
evangelical
church of Christ during those long `Dark Ages' of Europe when the
Church of Rome usurped the place of the Holy Spirit?" there usually
follows a notable silence. The Iona colony of Scotland may be
mentioned, or the later Waldenses of the Italian Alps, both involving
small numbers. There is a better answer to the question, however, and
the following narrative seeks to shed some light on it.

The story of the Church of the East's mission to
Asia is one that
needs to be told to today's church. It is the story of a dedicated
missionary effort and the ever expanding witness of Christians from
Antioch to Peking, nearly 6,000 miles by foot, until multitudes of
Christians lived from the 30th to the 120th longitude in medieval
times.

The facts and analyses that follow concerning the
church's great
epic of eastward advance, it is hoped, will bring encouragement,
edification, and perhaps warning to our contemporary churches in their
present mission to the unreached. Here is evidence that God gives
strength and conversions in the direst and seemingly most impossible
circumstances.

Here also is evidence that pitfalls to the church's
mission always
exist. Common examples are such things as an inadequate appreciation of
the spiritual deadness of the natural man, failure to recognize the
necessity of heart repentance and the meaning of baptism, the
temptation to consider external acts of piety as necessarily
representing inner holiness, the acceptance of liturgy and form in the
place of justification by faith alone and identification with Christ,
compromise with the world's secularism and other people's religious
practices, sacramentalism, over-identification with a particular
political regime, and concern with the elite that leads to failure to
reach out to the common people.

As troublesome a problem as any, however, to those
desiring to bring
the gospel by word and deed into a foreign culture, deeply concerned to
make the love and salvation of Christ understood, is the difficulty of
adequately contextualizing the gospel without compromising its true
meaning and uniqueness. The contextualization takes place not
necessarily when the missionary succeeds in crossing the barriers of
culture and language, so as to enable the listener to feel he
understands the westerner's gospel, but when this new understanding is
genuinely reflective of the New Testament message of Christ's
redemptive love and mercy and involves a heart commitment to Him.

The lesson of the gospel in the Near and Far East
during the Middle
Ages is that such failures as are referred to above can cause Christian
communities where churches once flourished to disappear so completely
that later generations not only do not know what the gospel is but are
not even aware that it was ever present in their midst. In those cases
the only witness to the living may be the testimony of the dead,
written on tombstones. An illustration of such a voice out of the past
is that of a ninth century Christian in a central Asian cemetery, where
the gentle words still whisper, "This is the grave of Pasak - The aim
of life is Jesus, our Redeemer."

The lessons of history need to be studied for, as
one sage noted,
"Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat its failures
in the future."

INTRODUCTION

In the year 635 A.D., a party of foreigners from the
distant West, a
vague area known to the Chinese for many centuries as Ta Chinn, reached
the capital city of the Great Chinese Empire, Ch'ang-An, later called
Hsian-fu. It was in the early years of the T'ang dynasty.

They indicated that theirs was a religious mission
to bring to the
empire knowledge of the doctrines and salvation of Jesus Messiah. The
emperor gave them permission to practice their religion which he
officially named the Ta Ch'in Chiao, the Ta Chinn religion. They
themselves used the name Ching Chiao, Luminous Religion (or
Illuminating?), and referred to their home church as The Church of the
East. The Church of Rome, however, called them "Nestorians," and its
thirteenth-century envoys and missionaries to the Far East always
referred to the churches of these early missionaries from "The Church
of the East" as "Nestorian" churches.1

Who were these early missionaries? Where did they
come from? Were
they holders of the "Nestorian" doctrine condemned as heresy at the
Council of Ephesus in 431? Did Nestorius himself hold it, and what was
their attitude toward him? What do the nine Chinese and two Syriac
manuscripts, discovered in north China this century, and the famous
"Nestorian" monument inscription, discovered in 1625 by Jesuit
missionaries near Ch'ang-An, reveal about their mission, theology, and
particularly their christology? Was there anything unique in their
theology or christology which motivated this great missionary zeal? And
why did this tremendous missionary effort end in failure? These are
questions which need investigation and which are pursued in the
following chapters.

Part I traces the main details of the eastward
expansion of the
gospel from Antioch to Syria, across Persia and Mongolia, and on into
north China by the ancient trade routes, noting the evidence of the
Christian missions' activity.

Part II examines the christological controversy of
the fifth century
to ascertain what the church understood "Nestorianism" to be and what
Nestorius's own presentation was, in order to come to an understanding
of the theology of Nestorius and "Nestorianism." Those not desiring to
follow the christological study of chapter six, with its linguistic
considerations, may find the conclusion at the end of the chapter an
adequate summary.

Part III examines the ten Chinese and two Syriac
documents found in
north China, considered to have been written by Christian missionaries
between the seventh and eleventh centuries, to learn in what sense
these missionaries were "Nestorians," and what relation, if any, this
connection had to their missionary zeal and subsequent failure.

Much of the material of the latter two parts was
prepared during
studies at Calvin Theological Seminary when writing on the theme, "The
Theology of the Nestorian Missionaries in China from 600-1000 A.D.,"
for a master of theology dissertation. The writer is much indebted to
the very able assistance of Dr. Fred Klooster, professor of systematic
theology at that institution, under whose direction the paper was
written.

We shall begin, then, by tracing the history of the
expansion of the
Christian church eastward and the entrance of its missionaries into
China.

CHRONOLOGICAL GUIDE

A.D.

35

A tradition arose that the apostle
Thomas Preached in the Kingdom of Osrohene of Armenia (upper Euphrates)
on his way to India.

100

A congregation existed in Edessa,
considered to be the first of the Church of the East.

180

Tatian's Diatesseron completed.

200

The Church of the Eat in Edessa had
a bishop and a theological college.

258

Djondishapur founded on the lower
Tigris with much Christian participation.

280

Bishop of Selucia-Ctesiphon on the
lower Tigris made first Catholicus.

301

Kingdom of Osrohene declared to be
a Christian state, the first in history.

325

Council of Nicaea held and a
theological college founded at Nisibis.

350

Syriac New Testament (Peshitta)
Produced.

400

Jerome's Vulgate, a Latin version
of the New Testament, produced.

424

The Church of the East appointed
its own patriarch and declared him to be their highest court of appeal.

428

Nestorius called from the Antioch
seminary to be the emperor's chaplain at Constantinople.

431

The Council of Ephesus met to
accuse Nestorius of holding a two-person christology and in his absence
declared him to be a heretic.

433

Formula of Union between the
patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria affirmed.

451

Council of Chalcedon held.

484

The Synod of Beth Lapat (lower
Mesopotamia) declared the Church the East independent of the Western
Church of Constantinople and Rome.

488

Emperor Zeno demolished the Edessa
theological college and the hospital was abandoned. The tradition of
both was continued at Djondishapur.

499

The Synod of the Church of the East
rejected celibacy of the clergy.

503

A bishop's seat was established in
Samarkand and a linguistic school at Merv, for preparing written
languages for the central Asian tribes, for Scripture translation.

600

Printing of full-page texts from
carved wood-blocks was underway in China. A horoscope of later times
set the birth of Krishna at this date.

618-907

The period of the T'ang Dynasty of
China.

622

Mohammed's Hegira to Medina and the
origin of the Muslim religion.

635

Christian missionaries reached
Ch'ang An, capital of China.

635-643

Metropolitans appointed to Samarand
India, and China.

641

The first Christian manuscript
written in Chinese presented to the emperor.

?17

The second group of Christian
missionaries arrived in Ch'ang An.

720

Shih t'ung (On History) first full
study of historiography written.

724-748

The visit of a Persian Christian
physician to the Japanese emperor and probable conversion of the
empress.

751

The defeat of Chinese troops west
of the T'ien Shan mountains by Arabs.

781

The Nestorian monument erected in
Ch'ang An.

782

Prajna, Indian Buddhist monk,
arrived in Ch'ang An with manuscripts to translate into Chinese.

800

Charlemagne crowned emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire.

801-806

Kobo Daishi and Dengyo Daishi from
Japan studied Buddhism in Ch'ang An, near the Christian church there,
returning to Japan to establish new, esoteric forms of Buddhism.

845

An edict drastically reducing
Buddhism, Christianity, and other foreign religions in China was
promulgated.

858-1342

A cemetery with tombstone dates and
crosses, discovered in Turkistan a century ago, was in use during this
period.

947-1125

The Liao of Manchuria established
their dynasty over north China.

1001

The first Muslim invasion of India
occurred.

1007

The conversion to Christianity of
large numbers of Keraits took place.

1036

A Tun-huang cliff-cave was sealed
containing some 2,000 Buddhist manuscripts, a few Christian ones, and
some Christian paintings.

1060

The earlier Chinese invention of
gunpowder was developed for cannon warfare and military flamethrowers,
water clocks, and the magnetic needle in a compass (for sea navigation)
were Produced in this century.

1124-1234

The Chin Dynasty ruled over north
China from the capital of Yen Ching near Peking.

1167

Te-muchin (Genghis Khan) was born
east of Karakorum.

1211

The Mongols conquered the Chin of
north China.

1220

The Mongols defeated the Muslim
army of Persia.

1227

Genghis Khan died.

1229-1241

Ogodai ruled as the Great Khan.

1241

The Mongols withdrew their
conquering armies from Austria, near Vienna, because of Ogodai's death.

1245

John of Plano Carpini arrived at
Karakorum in time to witness Guyuk's election to be the Great Khan
(1245-48). (Guyuk was said to be a Christian.)

1251-59

Mangu ruled as the Great Khan.

1253

William of Rubruck arrived at
Mangu's court, an envoy from the King of France.

1260-1294

Kubilay Khan became the founder of
the Yuan Dynasty of China.

1266

Kubilay requested the two Polo
brothers to bring back from Rome one hundred Christian scholars.

1271

The crusade of Edward I of England
failed to recapture Jerusalem, in spite of token Mongol help.

1274

The Act of Union between the
Western and Eastern Churches was adopted at the Council of Lyons.

1275-1292

Marco Polo visited Peking and
traveled in China.

1278

Two Oriental monks left Peking to
visit the patriarch at Bagdad, one becoming the next patriarch.

1281

The Mongols invaded Japan and were
defeated.

1291

Argun Il Khan (a Christian) wrote
to the king of France a proposal for a joint war on the Muslims of
Egypt, but died shortly after writing.

1369

The Ming Dynasty took over China
and proscribed Christianity.

1370-1405

Tamerlane, Khan of the Middle East,
destroyed many cities and slaughtered great numbers of Christians in
his Muslim Holy War.

PART I

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE FIRST CHRISTIAN
MISSION TO CHINA

Chapter 1

The Early Centuries

By the year 800 there were more Christians east of
Damascus than
there were west of that city. This statement may seem astonishing, if
not incredible, to the average Western reader who knows almost nothing
about Eastern church history. Students of the early growth and spread
of Christianity in the Eastern lands, however, will recognize it not
only as entirely factual but also as only one of many facts testifying
to the remarkable missionary zeal of the eastward bound Christians.

It all began with the fulfillment at Pentecost of
Christ's promise
of an outpouring of His Holy Spirit for the empowering of a witness to
Him throughout the world in the new international age of the gospel.
"Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia"2 were there, their
lives set
ablaze with a new dedication to return to their homelands to proclaim
the good news that Messiah had truly come for man's eternal salvation.
The planting of the church in Antioch was an immediate result. The New
Testament presents something of the history and significance of that
church's missionary effort in its westward movement. But history
records also an eastward expansion of the gospel with churches planted
in Damascus, Edessa and Mesopotamia, in Media, Elam and Parthia (the
later Sassanian empire of Persia) and in India. The church resulting
from all this Eastern missionary activity came to call itself the
Church of the East.

The Church of the East, considering itself distinct
from the Western
(Roman) or Eastern (Byzantian) Churches, holds its origin to have been
in Edessa, modern Urfa of Turkey, the capital city of the little
Kingdom of Osrohene in northern Mesopotamia (between the rivers). Their
tradition claims that King Abgar, son of Na'na, on hearing of Christ
and His remarkable miracles, wrote to Him inviting Him to come to
minister to his people. Our Lord received the message, so the story
goes, shortly before His crucifixion, so Thomas undertook to send Addai
(Thaddeus) one of the seventy who had been sent out to evangelize. From
this disciple's ministry the gospel was planted in Edessa, considered
the first Church of the East, its eastward expansion beginning from
that city.3

Whether one accepts this story or not, we do know
that there was a
church in Edessa early in the second century and that the bishops of
Edessa traced their succession to Serapion, Bishop of Antioch from 190
to 203.4 Also
the coins
of Edessa from 180-192 show a cross on the king's headgear. There is a
Syrian tradition, however, that the apostle Thomas was their first
patriarch. In a book called Eclesiastike, purporting to contain
the preaching of the apostles, the writer, Bar Aurai, maintains that
the apostle Thomas preached Christ in the East in the second year after
His ascension. Thomas was on his way to India, he 'states, and "We have
reason to believe it true, what the Syrian writers sand fathers say,
that they regard St. Thomas to be their first patriarch, and
accordingly they called themselves St. Thomas Christians."5 The Mar Thoma
Church of south
India holds to this day that Thomas came to them to preach the gospel
and to found their church.

It is in the early literature of the Syrian church,
however, that we
see most clearly its antiquity and independent nature. Their language
was the Aramaic, considered by many to be the language of our Lord, but
in the eastern dialect of Edessa, while the written language was the
old Syriac, Biblical Aramaic (Chaldee).6
Tatian, born in Edessa, in 150, composed a gospel harmony in continuous
narrative form, called the Diatesseron, which for well over a
century was the only gospel known by Persian Christians. About 350 a
Syriac New Testament, the Peshitta (simple) appeared--but
Burkitt claims that it was not a new translation, only a revision of an
Old Syriac ones.7

The Syriac Old Testament, Burkitt holds, is even
older than the name
Peshitta. It is quoted both by Aphraates (337 A.D.) and in the Actsof Thomas (first century), he contends. Specifically he states,
"The Peshitta is a direct translation from the Hebrew, in all
essentials, from the Messoretic text."8
Such a translation was inevitable, he feels, both because Edessa's
independent civilization would require a vernacular version and because
the Jewish converts in the church would insist on a translation from
the Hebrew.

Although Burkitt places the Creed of Aphraates at
about 337, he
holds that the Acts of Thomas was written by Judas Thomas himself, the
brother of our Lord. His comment on this is most interesting. "I
believe most firmly that it was originally composed in Syriac, not
Greek ... a doctrinal work cast in narrative form ... it is as truly a
book of religious philosophy as the Pilgrim's Progress, and it demands
from us serious study."9
Thus he would give strong support to the early origin and independent
nature of the church in Edessa.

Edessa--the capital of the small kingdom of
Osrohene, lying between
the outer edges of the two great empires of Rome and Parthia--sometimes
a tributary of Rome (116 A.D.) and sometimes under the suzerainty of
Parthia--became a Roman military colony in 216. The Sassanian dynasty
of Persia, farther south, conquered Parthia in 226 and throughout that
century was at intermittent war with Rome. In 258, the Sassanian king,
Shopur I, captured Antioch and brought many learned scholars and
doctors, among whom were Christians, back to Beth Lapat of Khuzistan,
near Susa. Here they were ordered by the king to build a new city,
Djondishapur, the future Eastern cultural, academic and medical center
of learning. It was here that many of the east bound missionaries
received their training in theology and medical lore. Later some of
them were to testify that like Abraham they had left the land of Ur to
bear witness for God.

The Romans recovered their losses and finally in 303
signed a treaty
of peace with the Persians making the Abaros River, a tributary of the
Euphrates, the boundary between the two empires. The Roman backed king,
Terdat, had been restored to the throne of the Osrohene Kingdom of
Lesser Armenia, a small country of northern Mesopotamia, and in 301 he
declared his kingdom a Christian state, the first in history, with
Gregory the Illuminator as the Church's head. After King Terdat
embraced the gospel his people became Christians. With the death of
Constantine in 327 and of Terdat in 342, however, the Persian king
launched an attack to regain the lost western territories. The
Christians of Armenia were identified with the Roman enemy, whose
emperors were now Christian, and violent persecution was carried out
against them, including the burning of their churches.

The Persian Zoroastrian priests were greatly
concerned at the
headway the Christians were making under the toleration of the treaty
conditions. They finally succeeded in stirring their king to pass
discriminatory laws against the Christians, which led to a renewal of
persecution, on the grounds the Christians were friends of the Romans,
sharing the sentiments of their enemy Caesar. Many Christians chose to
flee the country at this time, some going to Nisibus (under Rome) where
a theological college had been begun in 326 by a bishop just returned
from the Nicene Council. In 363, however, Nisibis was recaptured by the
Persians and the college fled to Edessa. In 399, a more tolerant
Persian king, Yezdegerd I, came to the throne and the Romans again
sought peace by sending an embassy seeking a treaty. An edict of
toleration was signed in 409 giving toleration to Christians in the
Persian Empire and the same to Zoroastrians in the Roman Empire.

The next year a synod was called for the whole area.
It met in
Selucia-Ctesiphon, on the lower Tigris, with some 40 bishops present,
and was under the leadership of that city's chief bishop, who had the
title of Catholicos. They adopted the Nicene Creed and defined the
boundaries of some of the sees. A new and special title was given to
the catholicos of "Grand Metropolitan and Head of all Bishops."

With the death of the peace-minded Yezdegerd I in
420, persecution
of Christians broke out again and for many of the same reasons as
before. Warfare with Rome also was renewed on the frontier but peace
was concluded in 422. The immediate effect on the churches of the
Armenian-Mesopotamian area was to convince them that they must by all
means disassociate themselves from the Roman Church's jurisdiction
(they were under the patriarch of Antioch) to escape future
persecutions for political reasons.

In 424 another Council was called, this time at
Markabta, with six
metropolitans and 31 bishops attending. They declared their
independence from the patriarch of Antioch and made their own
Catholicos their new patriarch. They further agreed "that no appeal
should be made from his decrees to 'western patriarchs'."10 Although no
doctrinal
difference was declared to exist between the Church of the East and
Rome, the Council did proclaim its Church to be independent in
government and, in the words of Wigram, "it did as much as a Council
could do to set an Oriental papacy over itself."11
It was the first major crack in the structure of the Christian Church's
organizational unity.

In the next act of separation from the Western
church, however,
doctrine was involved. The sympathies of the Eastern churches were with
the Antiochene theology as we shall see later. Many of the leaders of
their churches and of their theological college in Edessa, as well as
the founders of the school of theology in Djondishapur, had been
trained at the Antiochene theological seminary. Thus they opposed the
decision of the Ephesus Council of 431 and supported the deposed
Nestorius. The christological controversy raged in the Edessa
theological college itself for many years until in 488 the Roman
Emperor Zeno closed the college, had it torn down and on the site
erected a church dedicated to Mary with the controversial title theotokos.12Most of the
students and
faculty moved east to Nisibis to reopen a theological school there, one
which eventually became very large and influential.

Chapter 2

The Church of the East Establishes Its Independence

Prior to Emperor Zeno's closing of the Edessa
"Nestorian" work in
488, a very significant event in the history of the Church of the East
took place in Beth Lapat, near the ancient Ur of the Chaldees. An
important theological event had just occurred in the West. Zeno had
addressed his famous Henotican (instrument of union) to the
patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch, and all three had
adopted his formulation of the heretical monophysite christology. In
484 the Church of the East called a synod to meet in Beth Lapat to
adopt what Rome called a "Nestorian" confession, in response to the
Increasing monophysite takeover. They did not oppose the Chalcedonian
formula of 451, but resented that Council's confirmation of the
repudiation of Nestorius. Within the churches east of Antioch, by then,
there were three distinct parties centering around each's particular
christology, and each had its scholarly defenders. 1) There were the
followers of Cyril of Alexandria's doctrine that Christ had two
natures, one divine and one human, in one person.13 (Most of the monks of his
see, however, held that the human nature was divinized by the logos and
therefore, to all intents and purposes, did not exist after the
hypostatic union.) 2) The Church of the East was most amenable to
Nestorius's doctrine that Christ had two natures and two kenume (the
set of personal characteristics of each nature) in one person. 3) The
followers of the doctrine of Eutyches of Alexandria, however, held a
view that was gaining increasing support in the east, the monophysite
heresy that Christ had only a divine nature in His person after the
ascension, the human nature having been divinized.

By the time of the Beth Lapat synod, the churches of
Edessa and
Upper Mesopotamia had been captured by the monophysite heresy. To make
a sharp break with this error of the upper Mesopotamian churches, which
were still considered a part of the western church, and to escape
further controversy over the christological formulation, the synod
decided to separate the Eastern church not only from the Western
church's ecclesiastical jurisdiction (as in 424) but from its doctrinal
confession as well, particularly with regard to its adoption of the
Alexandrian monophysite heresy. Thereafter they considered themselves
to be a different church, the Church of the East. The crack had widened
into a complete break.

From then on not only in practice but in fact there
were two
independent Christian churches in the world, each with its own
government and doctrinal position. It was not that the Roman Church and
the Byzantian Church held the same christology, for Rome was duophysite
and the Byzantian eastern churches had become monophysite. But they
were still one church, the Western, Roman Church. The Church of the
East too was duophysite, with a slightly different way of expressing
it, but definitely not holding the view condemned at Ephesus as
"Nestorian" (making Christ appear to be two persons), as we shall see
later. But the Church of the East no longer considered itself a part of
the Roman Church, and the Roman church retaliated by labeling it
"Nestorian" after the deposed "heretic," Nestorius.14 In 499 another synod of the
Church of the East rejected the doctrine of the celibacy of the clergy
(though a later act required the highest clergy to be celibate, a rule
sometimes ignored in different times and places). This rejection of the
highly honored Roman rule made the Church of the East even more
disdained by the Roman clergy.

These Eastern or "Nestorian" Christians were
versatile and diligent
propagators of their faith. With the flight of the Edessa theological
school to Nisibis, outside the farthest borders of the Roman Empire,
and the opening of another in Djondishpur, with a hospital also in the
latter city, many Syrian Christians began to move eastward into Persia
and to revive the spirits of that harassed Church. Zernov writes that
"The Nestorians were renowned doctors. Some of them exercised
considerable political influence, being confidants and advisers of such
Califs as Harum al Rashid (785-809) and his successors. The third
center of Christian scholarship was Merv, where many translations were
made from Greek and Syriac into languages spoken in Samarkand and
Bokhara."15

The influence these centers of learning had on the
Arabs was also
very great. Schaff, in a very interesting footnote, states his wonder
that the "Nestorians" should have had such an important influence on
the geographical extension of knowledge, even on the Arabs before they
reached the learned Alexandria. They received their first knowledge of
Greek literature through the Syrians, he wrote, and learned of medicine
through the Greek physicians and those of the "Nestorians" at Edessa.
Then he adds, "Feeble as the science of the Nestorian priests may have
been, it could still, with its peculiar and pharmaceutical turn, act
genially upon a race (the Arabs) which had long lived in free converse
with nature, and had preserved a more fresh sensibility to every sort
of study of nature, than the people of Greek and Italian studies . . .
. The Arabians, we repeat, are to be regarded as the proper founders of
the physical sciences, in the sense we are now accustomed to
attach to the word."16

The "Nestorians" were firm believers in Christian
education. Every
bishop endeavored to maintain a school in connection with his church,
realizing the necessity of such education in a land where all
government education was pagan. "The chorepiscopos of every diocese,"
Wrote Wigram, "appears to have had education as his special charge."
Then he went on to write:

Scribes and doctors were highly
honored. The school
(of Nisibis) form(b a self-governing corporation, which could own
property, and was extradiocesan, its head being apparently subordinate
only to the patriarch. It was quartered in a monastery, the tutors
being brethen of the same.... Education was free, but students were
expect-d to maintain themselves.... Begging was forbidden; but students
might lend money to One another at one percent, and the steward had a
number of bursaries in his gift. The Course was purely theological, the
sole textbooks being the Scriptures, and more particularly the
Psalms.... The Church services also formed a part of the regular
course; and no doubt all the approved theological works of the Church
were to be found in the library. The students lied in groups of five or
six in a cell, where they ate in common.... The college in Sabr-Ishu's
day contained eight hundred pupils.17

During the year preceding the
Mohammedan conquest
Babai was the leader of the church in Persia, though there was no
patriarch at the time as the king wanted a "Jacobite," a monophysite.
Babai was an aggressive spiritual leader, and under him schools in
sixty places were restored or built. Many books were translated or
written to supply these schools, and missionaries and traveling
evangelists were sent to Many places. The statement has been made that
more than 2,000 books and epistles or letters, written by prominent
leaders of the time, were circulating among the Christians.18

By the year 424, as the missionaries
planted churches
northwards, Merv, Nishapur and Herat, south of the Oxus River, all had
bishops while their monks taught the converts how to read and improve
their vegetable growing.19
In a day when there was little understanding of the importance of fresh
fruit or vegetables to maintain health, the "Nestorian" physicians with
this knowledge brought healing to many With the medicinal use of a
"sherbet" of fruit juices and with the use of rhubarb, making both
famous throughout the Orient. In 503 a bishop's seat was established in
Samarkand. The missionaries kept Moving northward, with perhaps their
greatest success being the great Kerait conversions of the eighth
century, with 400,000 families converted. The Onguts and Uigurs also
were largely converted. Their historian Malech has reported:

During the
patriarchate of Mar Ishu
Jahb II, 636, Syrian missionaries went to China, and for 150 years this
mission was active.... 109 Syrian missionaries have worked in China
during 150 years of the Chinese mission.... They went out from Beth
Nahrin, the birthplace of Abraham, the father of all believers. The
missionaries traveled on foot; they had sandals on their feet, and a
staff in their hands, and carried a basket on their backs, and in the
basket was the Holy Writ and the cross. They took the road around the
Persian Gulf; went over deep rivers and high mountains, thousands of
miles. On their way they met many heathen nations and preached to them
the gospel of Christ.20

During the early years
of the
Mohammedan regime, the Syrian Christian churches had more freedom and
peace than under the Persian kings. A concordat was signed with
Mohammed whereby the Christians would pay tribute, in time of war
shelter endangered Muslims and refrain from helping the enemy. In
exchange they were to be given religious toleration, though they were
not to proselytize, and they would not be required to fight for
Mohammed.21
He had reason
to befriend the Christians for a "Nestorian" had been Mohammed's
teacher at one point and, in some early battles, certain Christian
communities had actually fought on his side against pagan tribes.22 So much
Christian influence,
though highly distorted, is apparent in his teaching that Islam has
been called a Christian heresy.

By the end of the
eighth century the
Church of the East had expanded to great distances with at least 25
metropolitans and one hundred and 50 bishops. Six bishops were the
minimum to support a metropolitan. They were all under the patriarch of
Bagdad, who had moved from Ctesiphon-Selucia in 763 to the newer city a
few miles up the Tigris. So vast was this patriarchate that
metropolitans in the outer regions were not required to attend regular
synods and had to report in writing only every six years.23 Zernov describes
as one of
the patriarch's activities that "He sent out missionaries to Tibet and
to various nomadic tribes and consecrated bishops for them who moved
with their flocks over the vast open spaces of central Asia."24

The location of some
of these 25
metropolitans is pointed out by Stewart, who cites the Synodicon
Orientale, translated by J. B. Chabot. There the metropolitan of
the Turks is placed tenth in the list and is followed by those of
Razikaye, Herat, Armenia, China, Java, India and Samarkand. He also
cites information, concerning the spread of the gospel in this period
to the Turko-Tatar tribes, from a new manuscript translated by Mingana.
This material is in the form of a letter from a Mar Philoxenus, of the
eighth century, to the governor of Hirta, and makes frequent reference
to Christian Turks throughout the area south of Lake Baikal. Mingana
gives evidence to support his belief that the manuscript really has two
parts, the latter written sometime between 730 and 790. It is this
section that speaks of the many Christian Turks in central and eastern
Asia. The writer states they were divided into strong clans, living
nomadic lives with tents, though very wealthy, and that they ate meat,
drank milk, had clean habits and orthodox beliefs. They used a Syriac
version of the Bible but in their worship services translated into the
Turkish language so that the people could understand the gospel.25

The manuscript also
mentions that
these Turko-Tartars had four great Christian kings who lived at some
distance from each other. Their names are given as Gawirk, Girk, Tasahz
and Langu. Mingana believes that they were the heads, or Khakans, of
the four tribal confederacies of the Keraits, Uigurs, Naimans and
Merkites. The populace of each king is said to have been over 400,000
families. If there were five persons to a family, this would mean two
million per king for a grand total of eight million.26 If only half that many
represented the actual population, it would still represent a Christian
community so great it would be a tremendous witness to the zeal of
those early missionaries.

Mingana declares that
the credit for
carrying the gospel of Christ to these tribes of central and eastern
Asia belongs entirely to

the
untiring zeal and
the marvelous spiritual activities of the Nestorian church, the most
missionary church that the world has ever seen. We cannot but marvel at
the love of God, of man, and of duty which animated those unassuming
disciples of Christ ... (who) literally explored all the corners of the
eastern globe "to sow in them the seed of true religion as it was known
to them."27

A final
witness to the
great extent of "Nestorian" Christianity by the beginning of the ninth
century can be taken from Gibbon. Of their church he said, "their
numbers, with those of the Jacobites, were computed to surpass the
Greek and Latin communions."28

Chapter 3

The Christian Mission to T'ang China

During
those early
centuries of the Christian era, as the missionaries of the Church of
the East were working their way eastward, the great Chinese Empire had
not been inactive in making western contacts. Hirth, in his compilation
of all the references to the Western nations in the Chinese historical
annals begins with a quotation from 91 B.C.

When the
first embassy was sent from China to An-Shi (Parthia), the king of
An-Shi ordered 20,000 cavalry to meet them on the eastern frontier....
After the Chinese embassy had returned they sent forth an embassy to
follow the Chinese embassy to come and see the extent and greatness of
the Chinese Empire. They offered to the Chinese court large birds'
eggs, and jugglers from Li-kan.29

Another
quotation, of 120 A.D., speaks of another embassy going to Ch'ang-An,
the capital of China, and offering "musicians and jugglers .... They
said of themselves: 'We are men from the west of the sea; the west of
the sea is the same as Ta-ts'in',"30
(the sea being the Gulf of Persia). From then on the designation Li-kan
is seldom used, and Ta-ts'in, with a later spelling of Ta-Ch'in,
becomes the usual designation. Since the early Christians in China, as
the famous Monument inscription of 781 indicates, were called Ta-Ch'in
Chiao, Ta Ch'in Religion, as we shall see shortly, it is important to
determine where Ta-Ch'in was. One of the early Chinese records is worth
quoting at some length:

The country of Ta-ts'in is called Li-chien
(Li-kin) and, as
being situated on the eastern port of the sea, its territory amounts to
several thousand li.. . . Their kings always desired to send embassies
to China, but the An-Shi (Parthians) wished to carry on trade with them
in Chinese silks, and it is for this reason that they were cut off from
communication. This lasted till ... (166 A.D.) when the king of
Ta-ts'in, An-tun, sent an embassy who, from the frontier of Jih-nan
(Annam) offered ivory, rhinoceros horns, and tortoise. From that time
dates the direct intercourse with this country.31

The country of Fu-lin, also called Ta-ts'in,
lies above the
western sea. In the southeast it borders on Po-ssu (Persia).... The
emperor Yang-ti of the Sui dynasty (A.D. 605-617) always wished to open
intercourse with Fu-lin, but did not succeed. In ... (643) the king of
Fu-lin, Po-to-li, sent an embassy. [Then mention of embassies in 667,
701, and 719 are followed by this statement.] A few months after, he
further sent ta-to-sheng [great-virtuous-priests, a term like
Reverend, doubtless for Nestorians who arrived then] to our court with
tribute.32

Saeki identifies An-tun with the Roman emperor
Marcus
Antonius.33
Hirth states,
"We may say, in a few words, Ta-ts'in was Syria as a Roman province;
Fu-lin was Syria as an Arab province during the T'ang dynasty
(618-907), and as a Seldjuk province during the Sung dynasty
(960-1280)."34
Saeki
believes that the etymological derivation of Fu-lin is from E-fu-lin
for Ephraim, between Jerusalem and Samaria.35
This opinion is corroborated by the reference in the first Chinese
Christian document of 638, "The Jesus Messiah Discourse," of which we
will take note later, in which we read, "Just about that time, the One
(Jesus Messiah) was born in the city of Jerusalem in the country of
Fu-lin (Ephraim)."36
Hirth also states it is his view "that all the first embassies sent
from Fu-lin during the T'ang dynasty were carried out by Nestorian
missionaries. The Nestorians enjoyed a great reputation in Western Asia
on account of their medical skill."37

The Chinese records give a graphic picture of
the long trade
routes across their country, around the south of the Gobi desert, to
the Oxus River, into Parthia and on to Mesopotamia. An alternate route
was by sea from Canton, around the Malay peninsula, past the southern
tip of India and into the Persian Gulf. Yule writes, "At this time,
(early fifth century) the Euphrates was navigable as high as Hira, a
city lying southwest of ancient Babylon ... and the ships of India and
China were constantly to be seen moored before the houses of the town."38 The Chinese
either turned
their goods, chiefly silks, over to the Arabs here, or over to the
Parthians at the Oxus River, the latter then bringing them to Hira.
There they were transshipped around the Arabian peninsula, up the Red
Sea to Solomon's Ezion-geber or the Aelana (modern Akabah) of the
Romans; from there caravans carried them to Petra, the great market
city, to sell them to the western traders. Of Petra Hirth writes:

During the first two centuries
A D., Petra or
Rekem, was the great emporium of Indian (and, we may add, Chinese)
commodities, where merchants from all parts of the world met for the
purpose of traffic.... Under the auspices of Rome, Petra rose, along
with her dependencies, to an incredible opulence.... This prosperity
was entirely dependent upon the caravan trade, which at this entrepot
changed carriage, and passed from the hands of the southern to those of
the northern merchants.39

It was not until the seventh
century that two
events brought about the demise of this great trading center. The first
was the smuggling of silkmoth eggs into Syria, concealed in a bamboo
cane, the presumption being that it was done by "Nestorians,"40 with the result
that "by the
end of the sixth century (Syria) appears to have been meeting the
west's demand for the raw material."41
The other was the fall of Petra to the Mohammedans after 640. It was
without doubt through these early oriental traders that the Syrian
Christians of "Ta-Ch'in" first heard of the greatness of the Chinese
Empire and determined to take the gospel there. It is even very likely
that they arranged to go with returning merchants. We know that the
time was early in the T'ang dynasty, when the empire had its widest
extent, its soldiers governing 811 the way to the Oxus River, for the
Nestorian Monument declares the year of their arrival at the capital of
Ch'ang-An (or Hsi-an-fu) to be 635 A.D.

Evidence of Christian
Activity in China,
635-845

Of all the evidence of the
activity of the
Christian missionaries in China which have come to light in the era of
modem history, none has been more dramatic than the report of the
discovery of the "Nestorian" stone Monument by a Jesuit priest in 1625.
It had actually been dug up by Chinese workmen, under an old wall, two
years earlier "at a certain place in Kuan-chung"42
which Saeki identifies as the site of a "Nestorian" monastery and
church near Chouchih, about 30 miles from Hsi-an-fu, the modern name
for the old capital, Ch'ang-An. When Trigault, the first Roman Catholic
missionary to see it, took rubbings it had been moved to Hsi-an-fu,
probably late in 1624. It is still there today, while an exact replica
exists in the Vatican museum, with still another in Japan at the
Shingon (True Word) Buddhist Temple on Koyasan.

When announcements of it were
first made in
Europe some doubted Its authenticity, claiming it was a "pious fraud"
of the Jesuits to show the antiquity of their Church's missionary
efforts.43
Of this Gibbon
has written:

The Christianity
of China,
between the seventh and the thirteenth century, is invincibly proved by
the consent of Chinese, Arabian, Syriac, and Latin evidence. The
inscription of Hsianfu, which describes the fortunes of the Nestorian
church, from the first mission, A.D. 636, to the current year 781, is
accused of forgery by La Croze, Voltaire, and others, who become the
dupes of their own cunning, while they are afraid of a Jesuitical fraud.44

One of the
criticisms of it was
that the style of writing "is too modern to be credited with a thousand
year's age."45
Of this
Hirth says it "is utterly baseless .... A Chinese connoisseur, who
had never heard of the Nestorian Tablet, and to whom I showed a tracing
of it, declared it at once as 'T'ang-pi,' i.e., written in the style
of, and containing the slight varieties adopted during, the T'ang
dynasty."46

The stone itself
stands over
nine feet high, three feet wide, and one foot thick, with two dragons
carved over the top edge, a small "Nestorian" cross near the top
center, and nine large Chinese characters below it reading, "A Monument
Commemorating the Propagation of the Ta-Ch'in Luminous Religion in the
Middle Kingdom (China)." It is stated to have been composed by a
Persian presbyter named Adam and erected on "the 7th of the First Month
of 781 A.D." by one "Lord Yazedbouzid" chorepiscopos of Hsi-an. Adam's
Chinese name is given as Ching-ching, and in Syriac, Saeki says, it is
stated on the stone, "Chorepiscopus, and Papash of Chinestan."47 The names of
some 70
missionaries are given in Chinese and Syriac at the end of the
2000-word inscription.

The inscription
describes how
the missionaries arrived in 635, were welcomed by the emperor, and
instructed to put some of their writings into Chinese. (A later
document, "The Book of Praise," indicates that there were then 530
Christian manuscripts at hand.)48
They were given permission by proclamation in 638 to stay and teach,
and a monastery was built for them outside the city in the I-ning ward.
The names of the T'ang emperors are mentioned and praised as
benefactors, some sending their portraits to be hung in the monastery
and providing generous patronage. In return, the priests prayed for
them and their ancestors daily. The arrival of 17 reinforcements from
TaCh'in in 744 is mentioned which is in harmony with a Syrian church
record of the departure then of these 17 missionaries49 Comment on the doctrinal
portion of the inscription will be made later.

A Japanese
scholar, Dr.
Takakusa, while studying "The Catalogue (of the books of) teaching of
Chakya (Buddha) in the period of Chanyuan" (785-804 A.D.), discovered a
passage referring to the Christian presence in Hsian, and particularly
to that of Adam Ching-ching. The passage referred to Prajna, the Indian
Buddhist scholar who came to China in 782. It stated: "He translated
together with Ching-ching, Adam, a Persian priest of the monastery of
Ta-Ch'in, the Satparamita sutra from a Hu (Uigur) text, and finished
translating seven volumes."50
The Catalogue writer went on to complain that Prajna knew neither Uigur
nor Chinese and that Ching-ching knew no Sanskrit nor understood
Buddhism, but both were seeking vainglory.

He further
mentioned that "They
presented a memorial (to the Emperor) expecting to get it propagated"
but that the Emperor (Tetsung, 780-804) was wise and after examining
their work determined that it was poorly done, "the principles being
obscure and the wording vague. The emperor then declared that the
Ta-Ch'in religion and Buddhism were entirely opposed to each other;
Ching-ching handed down the teaching of Mi-shih-ho (Messiah, using the
same three Chinese characters as were used on the Nestorian Stone)
while (Prajna) propagated the sutras of the Buddha. It is wished that
the boundaries of the doctrine may be kept distinct."51 With that the emperor forbade
the two from working together further.

The nine Chinese
manuscripts
and two Syriac ones found in China--some of them found in a cave sealed
in 1036 in Tun-huang52
With one claiming that it was 641 years since Jesus Messiah was born
and another giving the Chinese dating corresponding to 717--are also
strong evidence of the presence of the Christians in China. These
manuscripts will be described and examined for their theological
content later.

Striking
evidence of these
early Christian times is presented by the remains of the monastery
built at Chou-chih where the Monument vas found. The building has long
since crumbled away, but eleventh century Chinese poets have mentioned
it in their poems by the name of Ta-Ch'in Ssu (temple), and in 1933 a
famous tower on the property was still standing while the people of the
area still called the place Ta-Ch'in Ssu.53
Further, tombstones with "Nestorian" crosses on them, in areas where
the local records indicate they date from the Tang era of the eighth
and ninth centuries, have been found in different places in China.54

Farther west, in
the area of
the salt sea in Turkestan called Lake Issyk-kul, over 600 tombstones
with crosses on them were found in two ancient cemeteries. The oldest
date was 858 and the latest 1342. The inscriptions on many were in the
Syriac script but the names indicate that these people were native
converts. One inscription reads, "This is the grave of Pasak--The aim
of life is Jesus, our Redeemer." Another states, "This is the tomb of
Shelicha, the famous Exegete and Preacher who enlightened all the
cloisters with Light, being the son of Exegete Peter. He was famous for
his wisdom, and when preaching his voice sounded like a trumpet."55 Among the names
are those of
"nine archdeacons, eight doctors of ecclesiastical jurisprudence and of
biblical interpretation, 22 visitors, three commentators, 46
scholastics, two preachers and an imposing number of priests."56 A chorepiscopus
is also
buried there with mention that he came from a nearby city. This last
resting place of the saints of 700 years ago is mute witness of a past
genuine Christian presence. As Stewart says of it, "Only in the grave
stones from Semiryechensk (its Russian name) do we find evidence of the
rich and varied Christian life which prevailed in one tiny corner of
these extensive areas, filled as they once were with Christian
communities."57

The Tun-huang
cave of western
China, sealed, as mentioned earlier, in 1036 and not opened until about
1900, contained over 2,000 manuscripts, including some Christian ones.
Also it had a painting on its walls of a Christian bishop on horseback,
carrying a bishop's rod with a "Nestorian" cross on the end. In
addition there was in the cave a silk screen painting of a robed man
wearing a crown with a gold cross, with two other crosses around his
neck, holding a bishop's rod. This painting was acquired by the Sir
Aurel Stein expedition in 1908, and is now in the British Museum in
London.58 It
seems to be
beyond doubt a painting of an Oriental Christian bishop of the pre-1000
A.D. era. (See back cover painting.)

One of the
intriguing aspects
of the painting is that the right hand is held up with the thumb
touching the tip of the second finger. The "Nestorians" were well known
for their fondness for symbols. Was this posture a double witness to
the Trinity with its triangle of thumb and finger and the remaining
three fingers pointing upwards? Buddha images and paintings of earlier
centuries usually show him with hands clasped in his lap or an upraised
hand with open palm. In later centuries, however, it is not uncommon to
see Buddha figures with the right hand raised in the posture of this
painting of a Christian bishop. The question as to who used this symbol
first is not answered, but it does seem to have more significance as a
Christian Witness.

A tomb excavated
in Manchuria
in 1927 contained crosses and coins of the early eleventh century.
Historical records show that those buried there were Uigurs, a Tatar
tribe converted by the early missionaries.59
Saeki feels that the Syriac script still found in some places in
Manchuria today, which this writer has seen himself over some building
entrances, is "nothing but the greatest Nestorian relics of all."60

In addition,
numerous
references to the Persian missionaries in the land appear in the
Imperial historical annals of China. For instance, the full
proclamation of permission, issued in 638 and referred to on the
Monument, appears with "the Persian monk A-to-pen (Abraham) bringing
scriptures and teaching from far" specifically mentioned.61 Again, "In the
ninth month of
the twentieth year K'ai-yuan (October 732) the king of Persia sent the
chief Pan-na-mi (Barnubi) with the monk of great virtue, Chi-lieh
(Cyriacus) as ambassadors with tribute."62
But these casual references are too numerous to mention further. The
evidence of the presence of the "Nestorian" missionaries in China
during the T'ang era is incontestable. On the basis of the Chinese
records alone Hirth states dogmatically, "all the first embassies sent
from Fu-tin during the T'ang dynasty were carried out by Nestorian
missionaries."63

In Japan and
Korea also,
evidence of a past early Christian presence survives. Two beams of an
ancient temple, dating from the late seventh century, with crosses on
them and having inscriptions identified by professor Sayce as being "in
an alphabet akin to Syriac,"64
are in the Tokyo National Museum. In northwest Japan is a large tomb,
dating from about the same time, known to the local people as "the tomb
of Jesus." In all probability it is the tomb of a "Nestorian" Christian
who preached Jesus, perhaps even bore His name, who was buried there in
the tomb period. The Shoku-Nihongi, published in 797, refers
to the return from China in 736 of an envoy who brought with him "a
Persian by the name of Limitsi and another dignitary of the church of
the Luminous Religion (Kei Kyo-Chinese, Ching Chiao) called Kohfu."65 Elsewhere in
Japanese history
the Persian is referred to as Rimitsu, the physician. The Empress Komyo
was very much influenced by his teaching and later built a hospital, an
orphanage and a leprosarium, works of mercy typical of the "Nestorian"
practical Christianity, but not of the Buddhism of that day.

One of the most
sacred objects
of the Shingon sect of Buddhism at the Nishi-Honganji Temple in Kyoto,
founded by Kobo Daishi after he returned in 806 from China's capital
and contact with the "Nestorian" monastery there, is a copy of the
early missionary manuscript, "The Lord of the Universe's Discourse on
Almsgiving," a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount and other Matthew
passages. It is said that Shiriran spent hours daily studying this
Christian document.

The oldest
structure in ancient
Kyoto is the Lecture Hall of the Koryuji Buddhist Temple, rebuilt in
1165. According to Teshima, the original building was not Buddhist but
Christian, erected in 603. This building burned down and was rebuilt
about 818 as the Koryuji Buddhist Temple. When this writer visited it
in 1976, he was given a pamphlet describing something of the temple's
history but nothing of its possible Christian origin.

Amazingly,
however, the
pamphlet had on the cover page as the first two of five Chinese
ideographs the characters Tai Shin, the same being the first two on the
famous Nestorian Stone (in Chinese Ta Ch'in) indicating the
Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area homeland of the missionaries.
Immediately following the Tai Shin, in parentheses, was uzu masa in
Japanese hira gana script. Saeki claims that the ethnic origin
of these two, non-Japanese words (the meaning of which Japanese
scholars can only speculate) is the Aramaic Yeshu Meshiach, Jesus
Messiah. Remarkably the temple thus bears the names of its original
identity, Tai Shin, the place of origin of the religion and the
missionaries who brought it, and of Jesus Christ, the One once
worshipped at that ancient church. Further identity of uzu masa is in a
song of 641 recorded in the ancient history text Nihonshoki: "O Lord,
our Uzu Masa, How majestic is your name in all the earth! You are truly
God of gods."66
The
identification of Uzu Masa with the God of gods and Lord of the earth
could not be clearer.

The most revered
object in the
Koryuji Temple is the pine carving of a sitting Miroko (Maitreya)
Buddha, brought over from North Korea in the ninth century. The
features, including a large, thin nose, are Semitic, not Far Eastern.
This is the Buddha of the next coming, whose return to earth will bring
marvelous deliverance to all living beings, a concept that arose in
Buddhism about the beginning of the fourth century A.D. in India, at a
time when Christianity had made great progress there. Maitreya is held
to be the Hindi version of the Greek word Metatron, change of time,
denoting the time of the coming Messianic deliverance and new age.
Interesting also is the fact that the figures of the right hand of this
Buddha of the future coming are in the same posture of three upright
fingers, with thumb and one finger forming a triangle, similar to the
posture of the bishop's hand in the painting of the "Nestorian" bishop
of China.

In southwest
Korea there is a
cave with an entrance said to be in the pattern of the Christian
cave-churches of Syria. Some 16 stone plaques are built into the walls
with figures and implements carved on them which do not represent
Koreans or their culture but rather seem similar to Syrian Christian
scenes. The cave was built in the seventh century in honor of a "black
monk" who is believed to have come to Korea the previous century.67 Dr. J. G.
Holdcroft, for many
years a missionary in Korea, who describes this cave, also speaks of
interviewing Dr. J. S. Gale, an American scholar of Korean antiquities,
concerning the possibility of an early Christian presence in the
Orient. Dr. Gale replied: "Oh, yes, all of Asia had the Gospel but lost
it." Dr. Holdcroft continued, "He stated also that in the ancient
Korean literature, which is all written in the Chinese character, there
are even references to God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). `But,' said
he, `I have never found any Korean scholar who knew where those
quotations came from'."68
The Korean alphabet, a very simple one to learn, is held to have been a
gift of Christian missionaries over a millennium ago, to have been
revived by a Korean king some 500 years ago and then discarded, only to
have been revived again by Protestant missionaries for the gospel's
propagation during the past century.69
In the providence of God, the gospel was indeed preached throughout
Asia but through compromise, ignorance of Scripture, and distortion, it
became so perverted as to become almost indistinguishable from paganism
and was lost to the peoples to whom it came.

Decline o f
the Christians
in China from 845

In the year 845,
a great
disaster befell the Christian cause. An act of proscription was
promulgated by the emperor. The Christians were not the prime targets
but were definitely included. The act was directed against the many
Buddhist monasteries and temples by the emperor, "hating the monks and
nuns because (like moths) they ate up the Empire. He decided to have
done with them," as one report puts it.70
The act is referred to in the
Chinese historical records with specific reference to the Ta-Ch'in
religion, Christianity.

When
Wu Tsung was on the throne he destroyed Buddhism. Throughout the Empire
he demolished 4,600 monasteries, 40,000 Refugees, settled as secular
subjects 265,000 monks and nuns, and 150,000 male and female serfs,
while of land (he resumed) some tens of millions of ch'ing. Of the
Ta-Ch'in (Syrian Christian) and Mu-hu Hsien (Zoroastrian) monasteries
there were over two thousand people.71

A
further report states:

The rest of the monks and nuns, along with the
monks of
Ta-Ch'in ... all were compelled to return to the world. A period was
fixed for the demolition of those monasteries which were not to be
allowed to remain. (A few were to be designated objects of art.)
Materials from the demolished monasteries were to be used for repairing
yamens and post-,stages. Bronze images, mirrors, and clappers were to
be melted down for coinage.72

Although
this act was withdrawn two years later, the damage was done. Buddhism
never recovered from the blow, which may account for the fact that it
never became the dominant force in China that it became in Japan.73 Further, the
Christian work
definitely went into eclipse. The troublous times which followed the
disintegration of the Tang dynasty, with the sacking of cities and
slaughter of the inhabitants, as occurred in Canton where many
foreigners died,74
must
have been also a contributing factor to the eclipse of Christian
churches begun over 200 years earlier.

Foster
gives the report of an Arabic record, written in Baghdad about 987,
which tells of the writer meeting with a Christian monk who had seven
years earlier been sent to China by the patriarch, with five others,
"to bring the affairs of Christianity in that country to order." This
young man told the Arab writing the account, "that Christianity had
become quite extinct in China. The Christians had perished in various
ways. Their Church had been destroyed."75
The Christian monk had then returned to Baghdad. Whether this
delegation had really made an adequate tour is problematical. Saeki has
given evidence to show that the monasteries and churches in Chouchin
and Hsi-an continued in existence long after this time. Also in 1093
the patriarch Sabrisha III appointed a bishop George to Cathy.76 Nevertheless the
evidence is
that the progress of the Christian churches in China went through a
noticeable decline during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Saeki
reports that the famous Taoist scholar, Chia Shang-hsiang, who compiled
the life of Lao-tze about 1100 A.D., apparently was unaware that the
Christians had ever been present, for he classified "the remnants of
the Chinese Nestorians among the 98 kinds of heretical cults or
religions then known to the Taoists. He named it `The Messiah Heretics'
and put it in the 49th of the 98 heretical cults or religions
prevailing in the 81 countries around Liu-sha and its neighborhood."77

A
remarkable example of the influence of Christianity on pagan religion
can be seen in various concepts and rituals of the "Nestorians" being
adopted, in a distorted form, by Buddhists, thereby radically affecting
their tradition,78
as
witnessed by the development of the Lama sect in Tibet. Buddhism
reached Tibet in 640, sometime before Christian missionaries did, but
by the end of the first millennium, as striking resemblances show,
Tibetan Buddhism had incorporated the Far Eastern "Nestorian" clergy's
increasing preoccupation with demons, holy water, prayers for the dead,
confession and red vestments as well as their traditional monastic
system and hierarchy topped with a patriarch-in Lamaism's the Delai
(All Embracing) Lama.

Although
indications seem to warrant the conclusion that the curtain had fallen,
finally, at the end of the tenth century, on the drama of Christianity
in China, a story which opened so auspiciously at the beginning of the
seventh, it was not to be so. The evidence of its great revival three
centuries later will be given in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

The Mission Under the Khans

We
have already observed that during the seventh and eighth centuries the
missionaries began to take the gospel into the northern tribes of that
vast area of plains later known as Mongolia. An interesting witness to
the extent of the conversion of many of the southern tribes is given in
the report of Benedict the Pole who accompanied Friar John of Plano
Carpini on his mission from the Pope to the Khan's court in 1245. As
they journeyed north of the Black Sea and crossed the Don River,
Benedict wrote, "next the Alans who are Christians and then the Khazars
who are likewise Christianà.After, the Circassians, and they are
Christians. And finally, the Georgians, also Christians."79

The
first of the northern tribes to be almost completely converted were the
Keraits south of Lake Baikal. It was a later chief, the uncle of
Genghis Khan, who became famous to the western world as the almost
legendary Prester John.80
From the Keraits the gospel reached the neighboring Naimans to the west
and the Uigurs (ogres to Europe) to their west. The Manichean sect also
succeeded in penetrating the latter tribe and converting a portion of
it. By then, during the eighth century, the Uigurs had replaced the
East Turks as the strongest power of the area. The Onguts north of the
big bend of the Yellow River became Christians, but the Mongols and
Tatars east of the Keraits were more resistant.

The
Uigurs were open to civilizing influences and became a literate people
through a script worked out for them by the Christian missionaries, the
alphabet being the Syriac with additional letters for the new sounds.
The later Mongols, under the Khans, adopted this Uigur script for
writing their own language. The Christians, at their linguistic
headquarters in Merv, sought to have the languages of all the tribes
put into writing that they might have constant access to the gospel.
The effectiveness of their mission is testified to by an inscription,
found at Kara-Balsaghun in this Uigur writing, attesting an astonishing
transformation brought about through the conversion of the Uigurs. It
states, "This land of barbarous customs, smoking with blood, was
transformed into a vegetarian state, and this land of slaughter became
a land devoted to good works."81
Throughout the reign of the Khans, the Uigurs were used as their
secretaries.

Saeki
has given a translation of an interesting inscription that shows the
influence of the Uigurs and their religion in China just before the
Khan conquest. The inscription is on a stone monument erected on the
side of the avenue leading to the tomb of the honorable Ma, the
governor of Heng-Chow. It states that when the Chin emperor had
conquered Liaotung (north of Peking) he had the Uigurs of western Kansu
moved there. During the reign of the Emperor T'ai-tsung (1113-1134), he
heard of the image (lit., portrait) worshipped by the Uigurs, and
requested to see it. The inscription states that it was taken out of
"the House where the Uigurs meet and sing their hymns"82 to be shown the
emperor. He
was so impressed that he emancipated all their slaves and gave them
presents of money and land. Less than a century later one of their
leaders, Ma Hsi-chi-ssu, (a corruption of the Syriac Mar Sargis) became
the famous General Ma Ch'ing-hsiang and governor of Heng-Chou. In the
genealogical table of the Ma family, an excerpt of which Saeki
translates, appears the following statement: "The ancestors of the Ma
family were the descendents of the Niessuto'o-li (i.e. Nestorian) noble
family of the Western lands."83
This seems to be one of the few times the "Nestorians" are referred to
in the Chinese records by a transliteration of that name rather than by
the name Ta Ch'in, a reference to their land of origin..

For
four centuries Christianity spread through these primitive tribes,
although in many instances it was weak through ignorance and
compromised by the superstitious fear of and belief in the shaman, the
soothsayers. It was not until the coming of Genghis Khan, with his
conquest of all the tribes and amalgamation of them into the Mongol
Empire, including his conquest of China, that the Church of the East
came to its greatest influence and extent in the Far East.

Genghis,
whose original name was Temuchin, was born in 1167, a son of the
chieftain of the Mongol tribe, one of the smaller clans east of the
ruling Keraits. His father named him Temuchin (Finest Steel) after a
defeated warrior he admired. In subsequent battles with their
hereditary enemies to the east, the Tatars, the father was killed.
Temuchin then made a treaty with the Kerait leader, a Christian with
the title Prester (Presbyter) John. Gradually together they conquered
the neighboring tribes and through generous terms won them over. But
leaders of the aging Prester John foolishly moved him to attack the
Mongols, resulting in the defeat of the Keraits and his death. By 1205
Genghis was the sole suzerain of all the tribes, the ruler of the
Mongolian plains. The next year he called for the leaders of the tribes
to assemble for a general kuriltai (diet) and at this council they
elected him their emperor with the new name Genghis Khan, Emperor of
All Men.

In
1211 the new emperor began his great war with China. It was then a
divided kingdom, with the Manchu Chin dynasty ruling north of the
Yellow River, and the Sung dynasty south of the river. Genghis
conquered all the way across north China, destroying cities that
withstood his thousands of horsemen (each of whom led four horses in
addition to the one he rode) until he laid siege to Yen Ching, the
capital, near the present Peking. The city fell and the undefeatable
Khan turned his armies home to his capital, Karakorum, and then on to a
great southern campaign. Before reaching home he carried out what
became a common practice before each winter; he had his soldiers
slaughter the vast mass of conquered people he had used as slave
workers during the campaign. Concerning this practice, Lamb has made
the following comment:

It appears to have been the custom of the
Mongols to put to
death all captives, except the artisans and savants, when they turned
their faces homeward after a campaign. Few, if any, slaves appear in
the native lands of the Mongols at this time. A throng of ill-nourished
captives on foot could not have crossed the lengths of the barrens that
surrounded the home of the nomads. Instead of turning them loose, the
Mongols made an end of them - as we might cast off old garments. Human
life had no value in the eyes of the Mongols, who desired only to
depopulate fertile lands to provide grazing for their herds. It was
their boast at the end of the war against Cathay that a horse could be
ridden without stumbling across the sites of many cities of Cathay
(China).84

On the southward march, Genghis Khan's armies
defeated the
last of the nomad tribesmen of "the Roof of the World" and then crossed
the T'ien Shan range to face the great Muslim power of the Shah of
Kharesm. At this time Islam was at the height of its martial power. The
crusaders had been driven back to their coastal forts and the western
Turks were pushing the enfeebled Greek empire out of Asia. The great
army of the Shah was equipped with superior armor - steel swords that
could be bent double, chain mail, light steel helmets, gleaming shields
and even some guns. They also used Greek fire and understood flaming
naphtha and the use of catapult machines. This was the greatest
military power Genghis had yet faced. But he totally overthrew it.

As Genghis remained behind to reduce the great
cities of the
Kharesm empire, he sent two of his generals, with 20,000 cavalry, to
pursue the fleeing emperor. They followed him to Baghdad, then north
into Georgia, and, following news of his death, they crossed the
Caucasus Mountains, defeated a Russian army of over 80,000 and returned
to their Khan by way of circling the Caspian Sea. It has been called an
amazing march, "the greatest feat of cavalry in human annals."85 Meanwhile
Genghis reduced
city after city--Kashgar, Balasaghun, Samarkand, Bokhara, Herat, Merv,
Balkh, Nishapur--some of the greatest cities in the world, with all
their wealth, culture, industries, libraries, and ancient art were
destroyed.

Some descriptions of the extent of these
destructions--with
many of the cities being centers of strong Christian communities - have
been given. When Herat fell, 1,600,000 people were taken out of the
city and killed, this once magnificent capital eventually reduced to 40
persons. Kharesm's population was divided up with each Mongol soldier
being given 24 people to kill, until the population of 1,200,000 were
exterminated.86Merv,
the great educational and translation center of the Christians, had its
population of 1,300,000 divided into three masses of men, women and
children (excepting only 400 craftsmen whom the Mongols wanted), who
were then forced to lie down while they were strangled or slashed to
death.87
Nishapur,
another Christian center, had its population of 1,747,000 also put to
death. Muslim and Christian alike suffered terribly in this first
invasion of the Mongolian hordes. When it was over, Genghis Khan ruled
from Peking to Mesopotamia, from the Knieper River to the Indus, an
area covering eight longitude. In all of this "he succeeded in
destroying a larger portion of the human race than any modern expert in
total warfare."88

In 1222 Genghis returned to Karakorum for a
few years rest,
but in 1225 he was on the march again, southeastward, to conquer the
Sung dynasty of south China through Kansu, the center of the Tibet
kingdom. Here he died in 1227. The escort that accompanied the funeral
death cart to Karakorum had orders to strike down every individual met
so no word of the Khan's death could leak out in China. Genghis had
called himself "The Scourge of God," believing, as his great seal
declared him to be, "The power of God on Earth; the Emperor of
Mankind." In spite of his frightful behavior towards his fellow men, he
constantly affirmed that he believed in one God whose will he was
carrying out. His yasa or code of laws regulating Mongol life began
with the statement: "It is ordered to believe that there is only one
God, creator of heaven and earth, who alone gives life and death,
riches and poverty as pleasures Him-and who has over everything an
absolute power." The influence of the Christianity of the Keraits,
Genghis' strongest tribe, is without a doubt apparent in this statement
with its witness to the sovereign God of creation and providence. The
next rule of the yasa shows his sense of religious toleration, a mark
of all the Khans. "Leaders of a religion, preachers, monks, persons who
are dedicated to religious practice, the criers of mosques, physicians
and undertakers are to be freed from public taxes and charges."89

Genghis Khan's rule introduced the pax
Tatarus. It was
completely safe to travel from the Pacific to the Black Sea with a
Mongol safe conduct. He set up a pony express, with way stations every
25 miles for a change of horse, and lodging every 100 miles. The envoys
from the pope in 1245, led by John Plano Carpini, and from King Louis
of France in 1253, led by William of Rubruck, tell of traveling by this
highly efficient route, month after month, the more than 6,000 miles
from their homelands to Karakorum. Genghis gathered excellent Chinese
and Christian administrators and scribes about him who organized his
conquered domains efficiently. He required the Uigurs to give the
Mongols a written language, and Carpini has written, "These people,
(the Uigurs) who are Christians of the Nestorian sect, he also defeated
in battle, and the Mongols took their alphabet, for formerly they had
no written characters; now however they call it the Mongol alphabet."90 This Mongol
script from the
Uigur alphabet (gift of the early Christians) became the usual medium
of writing throughout the vast area of the Mongol empire and, as
Stewart says, "the parent of alphabets made use of by other more
backward tribes such as ... the Manchus." As an illustration he speaks
of an ancient Uigur manuscript existing which "supplies us with a
specimen of the Nestorian alphabet as adapted to the use of the
Ugro-Altaic tribes. It shows the connecting link between the Nestorian
writing and the various Mongolian alphabets."91

The Mongol emperors kept physicians in their
courts who were
available to the people. Among them the Christian physicians, with
their knowledge of the use of rhubarb and sherbet, were the most
respected. Rubruck mentions seeing rhubarb used at Karakorum while
Saeki translates a Chinese description of a Christian physician using
sherbet at the court of Kublai Khan. The writing speaks of physicians
who were of the Yeh-li-k'o-wen religion (the religion of Christian
priests) who made sherbet from fragrant fruits by boiling them and
mixing with honey. She-li-pa-ch'ih (a man of sherbet) is the name of
his office. His Excellency had the hereditary skill (to make sherbet)
and it often had miraculous effect. The Emperor specially granted to
him a gold tablet and made him devote himself solely to the office."92 The
missionaries' knowledge
of the value of fruit and vegetables for the sick and their physicians'
effective use of that knowledge was well known in the Khan empire.

In 1236 the Mongol armies were on the move
again, under their
new suzerain, Ogotai, and his chosen generals Batu and Subutai. Batu
divided his "golden Horde" of some 40,000 men into four army corps and
moved west from the Volga into Europe. Kiev fell and the population was
massacred; the German and Polish army was destroyed near Leignitz and
that city too was massacred. The Hungarian army of 100.000 was wiped
out as Subutai joined his forces with Batu's, and the Templers died to
a man as the Teutonic Knights had at Liegnitz. Pesth (Budapest) was
captured and the victorious armies of Batu and Subutai marched into
Austria to Nieustadt, southwest of Vienna, with no army left to stop
them. The European armies, mostly afoot, were slow and poorly led by
their kings. In less than two months of 1241 the Mongols had destroyed
three of their great armies and many small ones as the Mongol cavalry
captured all their great cities. The Mongols were in the process of
overrunning all the country south of Vienna in their ruthless manner
when news suddenly arrived that Ogotai Khan had died, poisoned by a
mistress, and that they were to return for a council meeting to elect a
new Khan. By that providence of God, Europe was spared from further
invasion. A thoroughly alarmed Christendom, however, now began to take
steps to send envoys to the Khans to see what could be done to prevent
such further devastating incursions. To Europeans the Mongols were
usually referred to as Tatars (their neighboring tribe) or Tartars, for
they liked to say they came from Tartarus (hell).

The first envoy, from Pope Innocent IV in
1245, was John of
Plano Carpini. Carpini wrote a fascinating "History of the Mongols" in
which he described the strange culture he was plunged into during his
long trek to Karakorum. There he was present for the election to the
Kha Khanship of Ogotai's son, Guyuk, whom Stewart, quoting a certain
Bar Hebraeus, holds to have been a Christian. The latter stated, "He
was a true Christian and in his days the prestige of the numerous
Christians bodies in his dominions was very high. His camp was full of
bishops, priests and monks.93
Many of his advisers and ministers were Christians, including the
Chinese son of Genghis' chief minister, Ye Liu Chutsai. This son had a
chapel with a cross on it built before his tent. Guyuk's mother was a
Christian as were many of the wives of Khans. Because the Keraits, for
a number of centuries Christians, were more advanced in civilization
the khans usually took their chief wives from their tribes. Dawson
speaks of the fame of Baigi, wife of Tuli and mother of the Great Khans
Mangu and Kubilay, and of the II Khan of Persia, Hulagu, as a Christian
and adds that the chief wife of Hulagu "Dokuz Khatun, is described by
the Armenian chronicles as a second St. Helena."94
Rubruck speaks of seeing the wife of Mangu Khan come to the "Nestorian"
chapel with all her children for Christian services, and of an occasion
when Mangu also came. One of the hymns sung at such services is
preserved to us. It begins "the Son of Mary is born to us" and is
written in alternate strophes, one in Syriac and one in Mongolian.95

Guyuk's reply to the pope through Carpini was
conciliatory
but contains some interesting theology.

The contents of your letters
stated that we
ought to be baptized and become Christians

... you wonder at so great a
slaughter of men,
especially of Christians and in particular Poles, Moravians and
Hungarians.... Because they did not obey the word of God and the
command of Genghis Khan and the Khan, but took council to slay our
envoys, therefore God ordered us to destroy them and gave them into our
hands. For otherwise if God had not done this, what could man do to
man? But you men of the West believe that you alone are Christians and
despise others. How can you know to whom God deigns to confer His
grace? But we worshipping God have destroyed the whole earth from the
East to the West in the power of God."96

The Western attitude, and the
charge against
it, do not seem to have changed much in 700 years.

Guyuk's favoritism to the
Christians can be
seen in an edict he issued concerning treatment of them in Muslim
lands. "We have come with authority and power to announce that all
Christians are to be freed from servitude and taxes in Muhammadan
lands, and to be treated with honor and reverence. No one is to molest
their gods, and those of their churches which have been destroyed are
to be rebuilt and they are to be allowed to sound their plates."97 Carpini in his
report wrote
of Guyuk, "he maintains Christian clerics and provides them with
supplies of Christian things; in addition he always has a chapel before
his chief tent and they sing openly and in public and beat the board
for services after the Greek fashion like other Christians, however big
a crowd of Tartars or other men be there. The other chiefs do not
behave like this."98
It
was doubtless this strongly pro-Christian position that led him to try
to restrict the voracious campaigning of sub-Khan Batu, who then
retaliated by arranging to have Guyuk poisoned in 1248. Guyuk's mother
served as regent for three years when Tuli's son, Mangu, was elected
the new Kha Khan.

Mangu's mother too was a
Christian (a niece of
Prester John), as was also his wife. Rubruck, as mentioned, reported
that he saw this first wife and her children worshiping in the
"Nestorian" chapel, that her daughter was a devoted Christian, and that
the oldest son seemed to be also. Mangu had Christian advisers, his
chief secretary being one, and provided one of their scholars to be the
teacher of his oldest son. Rubruck describes how at the services the
Christians "proffered their right hand to all present in the church,
for this is the custom of Nestorians on entering the church."99 He also mentions
visiting "a
completely Nestorian village" and states that at Mangu's headquarters
during Quinquagesima, the Lent of the Easterns, great crowds of
Christians streamed every day of the first week to the church, the
archdeacon of which was "a well-educated man." He adds, "On Easter Eve
the Nestorians baptised in the most correct manner more than 60 people,
and there was great common joy among all the Christians." He also
mentions that "Nestorians" were living in China: "There are Nestorians
in 15 cities in Cathay and they have a bishopric there in the city
called Hsi-chin (near Peking) ."100

During Mangu's reign Hulagu,
his brother,
founded the 11 Khan dynasty in Persia and ruled in Baghdad until he
died in 1265. Stewart has written of his wife:

Dokuz Khatun is
described as
"the believing and true Christian queen." She exercised a great
influence for good on her husband. When Baghdad was taken by the
Mongols, the Christians, as Bar Hebraeus tells us, were spared death
and torture because of "the magnanimity, the wisdom and the marvelous
high character of Hulagu." In 1265 Hulagu and his wife died. "The
Christians of the whole world greatly mourned the loss of these two
great luminaries and protagonists of the Christian religion," Bar
Hebraeus concluded.101

A Muslim writer
later wrote
that when in 1259 Hulagu proclaimed religious freedom of worship, with
no Muslim interference, "On that day there was no single Christian of
the common people or of the highest who did not put on his finest
apparel." Two decades later Il Khan Arghun ordered that Christian
churches destroyed in the previous wars were to be rebuilt. From the
time of Muhammed in the seventh century, Christians from Syria to India
never had more freedom nor prestige than in the thirteenth century
under the Il Khans.

Following
Mangu's death in
1259, his brother Kubilay was elected Kha Khan the next year. In 1267
Kubilay moved his capital to Khanbalik (Khan capital city), a city he
founded on the edge of what is now Peking, and established the Yuan
dynasty of China. Marco Polo, who spent nearly 25 years serving him,
has given with elaborate praise many vivid descriptions of his empire -
the efficiency of his administration, the magnificence of the paved
highways covering China, the humaneness with which he governed his
people and the splendor of his court. A modern historian gave this
appraisal of Kubilay's reign: "He ruled over a wider extent than any
Mongol or indeed any other sovereign. He was the first to govern by
peaceful means. The splendor of his court and the magnificence of his
entourage easily surpassed that of any Western ruler."102

Marco Polo also
frequently
refers to the many "Nestorian" Christians he found throughout China on
his travels for the emperor. He especially singled out "the beautiful
Church of Nestorian Christians in Hangchow," the capital of the
southern Sung dynasty, which Kubilay Khan captured in his conquest of
all China. Remnants of this church, according to Saeki, stone relics,
are still there, while the street it was on, Mao Lao Hsiang, he
suggests, is a survival of the Syriac Mura (meaning church) Lane.103 Polo speaks
of seeing three
churches in Kanchou in the far west where Christianity was strong and
the government of the province was in the hands of Christians. Saeki
also tells of discovering in the imperial history of the Yuan Dynasty
the record of Ai-hsieh, a high minister of Kubilay Khan's court, "a man
from Fu-lin (Ephraim) in the Western Lands," whom the emperor greatly
honored and valued for his integrity and forthright, uncompromising
advice, even though it frequently differed from the emperor's. This man
seems without question to have been a Christian, with the names of his
children being given as Elijah, Daniel, Isaac, George, and Luke. His
wife's name was Sarah. Chinese records frequently associate men from
Fu-1in with the Ching Chiao religion, Christianity.104

A fascinating
testimony to the
virility of the Christian witness in China during this time is the
story of two young Christian leaders who, in 1278, set out from
Kahnbalik to see Jerusalem. Both were Orientals, Rabban Sauma an Ongut
Turk born in the capital, and Rabban Markos his fellow countryman.105 While they
were still in
Mesopotamia the patriarch of the Church of the East died and in 1281
Markos was elected to take his place. Three years later, together with
the Il Khan Argun, Markos sent his friend Sauma to the Western powers,
asking for joint action against the Muslims to regain Jerusalem. He
visited Philip IV of France, Edward I of England, and the new pope,
Nicholas IV, conducting Christian services with them. Dawson has given
us the following report:

Thus
when the
cardinals expressed surprise that a Christian priest, attached to the
patriarchate (at Baghdad) should have come as an envoy from "the king
of the Tartars," Rabban Sauma replied: "know ye that many of our
fathers in times past entered the lands of the Turks, the Mongols, and
the Chinese and have instructed them in the faith. Today many Mongols
are Christians. There are queens and children of king:; who have been
baptized and confess Christ. The khans have churches in their camps.
They honour Christians highly and there are many faithful among them.
And as the King is united in friendship with the Catholics (patriarch)
and purposes to take possession of Syria and Palestine, he asks your
aid for the conquest of Jerusalem.106

Edward
I,
tremendously impressed with what he had heard, replied to Rabban Sauma,
"We have seen a thing than which nothing is more wonderful, that is to
say that in the countries of the Franks there are not two confessions
of Faith, but only one confession of Faith, namely that which confesses
Jesus Christ; and all Christians confess it."107
Since it was clearly understood that Rabban Sauma was a "Nestorian"
Christian, representing his Church as an envoy of the patriarch,
Edward's words were a striking testimony to the fact that the Church of
the East's christology was not now being held suspect of the heretical
doctrine for which Nestorius was accused and condemned in 431. Sauma
used the East Syrian liturgy but both Edward I and the Pope received
communion from him. In the summer of 1274, at the Council of Lyons, an
Act of Union had been subscribed to by the Eastern and Western
Churches, with the envoys of Abaga Il Khan present. Apparently the new
spirit of detente included the Church of the East, long called
"Nestorian," and a more objective realization that it had not really
been christological doctrine which had divided them in the past. The
pope sent back a reply with Rabban Sauma to Markos, who ruled under the
patriarchal name of Mar Yaballaha III, in which he confirmed the
latter's "patriarchal authority over all the Orientals." For one brief
period of history sovereigns either espousing Christianity or friendly
to it reigned from the Atlantic to the Pacific across Europe and Asia.

A
politically
divided Europe was not able to rally around the Mongol request for
united action against the Saracen hold on Jerusalem. Edward I was
deeply convinced of the significance of the opportunity before them but
could not raise support for united action. The powerful Mameluk
sultanate of Egypt gradually pushed the Christians and Mongols out of
Palestine and Syria. Argun's own son became a Muslim in 1291, in spite
of his baptism, and the opportunity for continued religious toleration
for Christians from the Atlantic to the Pacific under sovereigns
friendly to Christianity was lost. In the century that followed, the
advance of the gospel was politically and religiously resisted
throughout Asia.

Kubilay
Khan's
benevolent reign was coming to an end at this time. He was the first
Mongol ruler of a united China and twice (1274, 1281) he had tried to
add Japan to his domains with great invading fleets. The second attempt
was a total disaster as a great typhoon struck (called by the Japanese kamikaze,
a divine wind) destroying the fleet. One of the relics of that
invasion is preserved in the Nichiren Mongolian Invasion Museum of
Fukuoka, an iron helmet with a "Nestorian" cross inlaid in silver
within a heart design. Spears, swords, and even two hand guns used in
the 1281 invasion are also there.

From
then on
Kubilay Khan limited himself to more peaceful enterprises. His system
of roads and canals was unsurpassed anywhere. He maintained a postal
service throughout the twelve provinces into which he divided China. He
produced paper currency, printed by woodblock printing. When Francis
Bacon described the three Chinese inventions of printing (improved to
movable type in Kubilay's era), gunpowder, and the magnetic compass,
all of an earlier period but all improved under the Yuan, he declared
they "changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world."108 In 1266
Kubilay had sent the
uncles of Marco Polo home to the Pope with a request to bring back a
hundred men of learning, devoted to Christianity, who would be capable
of "proving to the learned of his dominions by just and fair argument
that the faith professed by Christians is superior to and founded on
more evident truth than any other." The Pope replied by sending John of
Monte Corvino, who began an active center of Mongol Catholicism.

Kubilay
Khan
died in 1294. His dynasty continued until 1369 when the Ming revolution
ousted it and a new dynasty began. The Mings took a strong position
against all forms of Christianity and within a decade brought about the
suppression or extirpation of all churches and the expulsion of
Christians from Peking and all government offices. Vigorous persecution
broke out against the Christians. Stewart points out that they had to
flee the country, abjure Christianity or hide their identity in a
secret society, of which many new ones sprang up.109

The
persecution
of the Ming dynasty was even surpassed by that of the new ruler of the
former domains of the 11 Khans. Tamerlane (Timour the lame), born near
Samarkand in 1336, the son of a Turkish tribal chief, began a series of
conquests that made him one of the greatest conquerors and destroyers
of men and their civilizations in history. From Moscow to the Ganges,
from the borders of China to the Aegean Sea, he conquered all. He was a
Muslim who combined the savage bigotry of the Holy War with the
ruthlessness and skill of Genghis Khan. The pax Tatarus had brought
open highways and 7,000 miles of peaceful interchange of commerce; the
new rule of the Muslims turned fair lands into deserts, closed the door
to the distant merchant and the missionary, and erected an iron curtain
between the East and the West.

Tamerlane
destroyed cities without mercy. After taking Isphahan, he ordered each
of his soldiers to bring in a required number of heads until he had a
pile of over 70,000. On the ruins of Baghdad, 90,000 heads were piled
up. Delhi fell to him in 1398 with the slaughter of immense numbers,
including the execution of over 100,000 prisoners he had collected to
help in the labor of the invasion. His final expedition was to conquer
China, and he gathered an army of 1,800,000 to march north from
Samarkand in 1405. He declared, "I mean to exterminate the idolators of
China. We will proceed to this holy war. We will slay the infields, and
mosques shall everywhere rise on the ruins of their vile temples."110 His death
that year saved
China from a frightful invasion.

Under
Tamerlane
Christianity was ruthlessly extirpated throughout the vast portions of
Asia he ruled. Stewart declares: "When he invaded Georgia ... the
Christians who resisted were slaughtered, their churches destroyed and
all sacred vessels and furniture given to the flames." Again,
concerning a later expedition, he says of Tamerlane: "He did not omit
to perpetuate the recollection of his 'immitigable hatred' of
Christianity by the destruction of every monastery and every church in
the districts on the line of march. Seven hundred towns, hamlets and
monasteries, and every church built of stone and probably those built
of other material as well, were levelled to the ground in another
province. The wretched inhabitants were hunted to their retreats,
dislodged and finally slaughtered."111
An explorer of the last century, describing what he found in central
Asia, says of Tamerlane, "Having laid waste thousands of towns and
destroyed countless numbers of men he left a great part of Asia a
desert, covered with human bones and bloodstained ruins."112

In
India the
Christian mission of the Church of the East had been very successful in
the northern and southwestern regions. A mark of its success was that
by the eighth century the Brahmins apparently felt compelled to create
a divine figure to compete with that of Christ. Of this Stewart has
written, "The fabrication of the incarnation and birth of Krishna was
no doubt meant to answer a particular purpose of the Brahmins who were
sorely vexed at the progress that Christianity was still making and
were afraid that if it were not checked they would lose both their
influence and emoluments."113
He points out that a study of the horoscope of Krishna fixes the date
600 A.D. as the earliest possible date for the invention of the Krishna
legend. He footnotes outstanding scholars who consider the eighth
century the probable time for the origin of the Krishna story.114

It
was not the
tricks of the Brahmins, however, but the invasion of Tamerlane's
Muslims which did the greatest damage to the Christian cause. In spite
of both, one portion of the Christian church, the Mar Thoma church, has
survived to the present day. Nonetheless, by 1400, through the Mings of
China and the Muslims under Tamerlane, the Christian church was
virtually blotted out of Asia. In the two centuries from Genghis to
Tamerlane, the Khans succeeded in destroying something like 20 million
people. It was not until the modern ruler of China, Mao Tzu Tung, with
his estimated 45 million executions, including 200,000 Christians,115 appeared in
history that
anyone was again responsible for a comparable slaughter of his fellow
men.

The
ancient "Nestorian" Monastery of Rabban Hormizd, founded A.GR. 873=A.D.
562. It lies about 30
miles to the north of Mosul (Nineveh), close to the village of Al-Kosh,
the traditional birthplace of Nahum the Prophet.

(No.
1) A stone cross found in the ruins of the Shih-tzu-ssu or Temple of
the Cross, near Peking, which may mark the site of the cave in which
Rabban Sauma, an Ongut Christian, lived for seven years (1270-1277)
before becoming the Bagdad patriarch's representative to the kings of
Europe. Cross No. 2 stood in the south-east corner of the temple and
has a Syriac Scripture (Peshitta) quotation: "Look ye unto Him, and
hope in Him" (Ps. 34:5).

Altar
slab preserved in the Church of St. Thomas, on St. Thomas's Mount, near
Madras.

The
Cross sculptured on the famous Nestorian Monument-at Hsi-an-fu. It
stands in the middle of a dense cloud which is symbolic of
Muhammadanism, and upon a lotus, which symbolises Buddhism; its
position indicates the triumph of the Luminous Religion of Christ over
the religions of Muhammad and the Buddha. The sprays of flowers, one on
each side, are said to indicate rebirth and joy.

The
"Nestorian" Monument, set up in China in 781, as it appears in Hsian
today. Its title reads: Chinese Monument of the History of the Luminous
Religion (Christianity) of Ta Chin (Syria).

Maitreya
Buddha, image of the future coming Buddha, in the posture of thumb and
finger forming a triangle with three other fingers upright, 7th
century. It is now in the Kyoto temple designated Tai Shin (for ancient
Syria) Uzu mass. Japanese scholar Saeki believes Uzu masa to be derived
from the Syrian Yeshu Meshia for Jesus Messiah.

Map showing the Distribution of the "Nestorian"
Churches.

The
obverse and reverse of a silver Paizah, with an inscription in the
Uighur character. The Paizah was worn on the breast, being suspended
from the neck by a chain which passed through the moulded iron ring
near the rounded end. The Uighurs were one of the first Mongolian
tribes to convert to Christianity in the 8th century. The Paizah was a
symbol authenticating the bearer as an official messenger of the khan,
the leader.

Portrait
of Kublai Khan, the son of Hulagu Khan, Emperor of all China (died
1294).

Temujine,
the son of Yessugai and Ogelou, commonly known as Chingiz Khan. Born
about 1160, died 1227.

From
a portrait preserved in the old Imperial Palace at Peking.

Mongolian
general's helmet left on the beach after the retreat of the invading
Mongols in 1281. The helmet bears a carving of a shield or heart with a
Christian cross in the center. It is in the Nichiren Museum in Fukuoka,
Japan.

Painting
of the 1281 Mongolian invasion of Kyushu, Japan, with two preserved
hand guns in the foreground. Nichiren Mongolian Invasion Museum,
Fukuoka.

PART
II

THE
NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY

Chapter
5

Nestorius
and "Nestorianism"

The
Fifth-Century Church's Concept o f "Nestorianism"

Nestorius,
according to Socrates,116
was born in Germanica, a city of eastern Cilicia, but neither the date
of his birth nor the events of his early life are known. He doubtless
studied at the theological school of Antioch under Theodore of
Mopsuestia, its most famous teacher. It was Theodore who developed a
christology in which our Lord's two natures were held so rigidly apart
that he was accused of making Christ into two persons and of being the
real founder of the heresy later known as Nestorianism.117 He was also a
proponent of
the doctrines of man's free will and non-inherited sin, having written
a treatise "Against the Defenders of Original Sin" that favored
Pelagius's view.118
As a
monk and priest of the monastery of Euprepius, by the walls of Antioch,
Nestorius became famous as an eloquent preacher. His character,
however, has been summed up in these words: "He was an honest man, of
great eloquence, monastic piety, and the spirit of a zealot for
orthodoxy, but impetuous, vain, imprudent, and wanting in sound,
practical judgment."119

In
April, 428,
the emperor had him installed as patriarch of Constantinople, and in
his first sermon he declared a campaign against heretics, implementing
it that week by having an Arian chapel demolished.120 He had strict laws passed
against various sects but treated favorably the Pelagian leaders who
were in the city, having been banished from Rome as heretics.121 The first
incident of what
was soon to be the Nestorian controversy was occasioned by a sermon of
his Antiochene chaplain, Anastasius, in which he proscribed the use of
the popular term theotokos for Mary, doubtless emboldened to
do so because Theodore had vehemently repudiated it in the school of
Antioch. When a furor was raised in the city over what was considered
to be an insult to Mary and a denial of the true deity of Christ,
Nestorius preached a series of sermons upholding the view of
Anastasius. Very quickly copies of these were sent to Cyril, patriarch
of Alexandria, who thereupon attacked Nestorius in sermons and letters
to the Egyptian monks, as well as in lengthy and acrimonius rebuttals
to Nestorius.

From
that point
matters moved to a climax quickly. Nestorius called a local council to
condemn his local antagonists122
and wrote the pope of Rome to justify his position and gain that
bishop's backing. Instead, his letters and sermon reports previously
sent there from critics in Constantinople were turned over to a John
Cassian of Marseilles who wrote violently against Nestorius as renewing
Pelagianism and Ebionitism. "He (Cassian) misunderstands and
exaggerates the teaching of his opponent, but his treatise is
important," writes a Catholic significantly, "because it stereotyped
once for all a doctrine which the Western world was to accept as
Nestorianism."123

It
should be
noted, however, that Nestorius himself has pointed out that when in
Constantinople he first heard of the disputation about theotokos, before
he or his chaplain ever preached on the matter, he called in the
disputing leaders and, finding that neither party wanted to deny either
the true deity or true humanity of the Lord, he told them that in using
the term theotokos "we sin not; but ... let us make use of
that which is very plainly (affirmed), that is, of the Word of the
Gospel: Christ was born, [Christotokos].124Loofs also points out that "even in his first letter to Pope
Celestine, after having expressed his strong aversion to the term theotokos,
he nevertheless wrote 'The term may by tolerated'."125And in a
sermon in the
spring of 429, known to Cyril before he wrote, Nestorius stated, "If
you will use the term theotokos with simple faith, it is not
my custom to grudge it to you,"126
which he repeated in a sermon a year later adding his usual
stipulation, "only do not make a Goddess of the virgin."127 Nestorius
blames Cyril for
the controversy's continuance. "Now the clergy of Alexandria, who were
in favor of his [Cyril's] deeds, persuaded them (of Constantinople) as
persons deceived that they should not accept the word `Mother of
Christ,' and they were stirring up and making trouble and going around
in every place...."128
That Cyril was very jealous of the "upstart" see of Constantinople, a
learned but very unscrupulous man, is the verdict of history.129

Cyril
sent his
correspondence with Nestorius to Rome along with some sermons of the
former and five treatises designated "Contra Nestorium." In the latter
he charged Nestorius with heresy on the grounds of teaching "that the
Blessed Virgin is mother of one nature, not of the person" and of
saying, "No one can bring forth a son older than herself."130 Mary did not
bring forth the
Word of God but the man Jesus as His temple, "the animated purple of
the King."131
Nestorius,
Cyril claimed, held that "the Incarnate God did not suffer and die, but
raised up from the dead him in whom He was incarnate ... There are two
natures, he says, and one person; but the two natures are regularly
spoken of as if they were two persons, and the sayings of Scripture
about Christ are to be appropriated some to the Man, some to the Word."132 Such were the
basic charges
brought against Nestorius.

The
pope called
a synod in Rome, and on the basis of these charges Nestorius's views
were declared heresy, and he was given ten days to recant or be deposed
and excommunicated. Cyril was given the authority to proceed to
implement the sentence. He too called a local synod which brought in
the same verdict and prepared 12 anathemas against the views of
Nestorius. It propounded the Alexandrian "hypostatic union" view--"the
Word . . . united by hypostasis to flesh," a "union by
nature," henosis phusike, in Christ.133
Cyril claimed apostolic succession for his doctrines, "the true
confession of the blessed Fathers."134
Nestorius countered with his own anathemas, and the emperor called for
a Council the next summer, 431, to meet at Ephesus to settle the
controversy.

How
did it come
about that two such ancient sees as Alexandria and Antioch should
declare themselves to be so far apart in such a basic matter as an
understanding of the person of Christ, and both claim to be the true
representatives of the apostolic, Biblical and patristic tradition? An
answer to this question by way of comparing and contrasting the origin
and nature of the two traditions is necessary for a proper
understanding of the controversy and the Nestorianism which emerged
from it. The Alexandrian tradition, for instance, was born in an
environment where the Platonic philosophy was highly venerated, with
its tradition of considering the ideal world as that which had real
value, thereby downgrading creation, thus exerting a constant, though
often unconscious, influence towards emphasizing the divine nature of
Christ to the neglect of the human. The Antiochene tradition, on the
other hand, grew up where the Aristotelian philosophy was honored, with
its emphasis on the empirical and particular, and consequent scientific
impulse, favoring an approach to the study of Jesus from the human
side, the one men saw in history as recorded in the gospel narratives.
Antiochene Orientals were much less metaphysically minded than the
Greek Alexandrians, and found it difficult to distinguish properly the
abstract from the concrete. To this day, for instance, a modern eastern
Syrian fails properly to differentiate between "man" and "manhood,"
casually saying "'there is much manhood' in a room when he means that
there are many men present."135

The
Alexandrians
were heirs of the Philonic tradition of the allegorical interpretation
of the Scriptures, with its quest for the spiritual, hidden meaning,
whereas the Antiochenes inherited the scientific approach, and the
Jewish reverence for the Scriptures, resulting in an historical
interest in--and grammatical, literal interpretation of--the Bible. The
former's interpretive method encouraged speculation and led to
principal, theological interests, producing the first attempt at
systematic theology, while the latter's background led to practical
concerns, their monks founding schools and hospitals from which came
educators, doctors, and missionaries.

The
soteriological interest of the Alexandrians focused on the incarnation,
the concept of redemption dominating the fourth century being that of
the Son's taking on human flesh and thereby "being humanized that men
might be deified."136
The
view of a leader of the next century has been given the following
description:

What
rather is really characteristic in Cyril's position is his express
rejection of the view that an individual man was present in Christ,
although he attributes to Christ all the elements of mans nature. For
Cyril, however, everything depends on the possibility and actuality of
such an human nature, on the fact, namely, that in Christ a hypostatic
union was reached and that this union forthwith purified and
transfigured human nature generally. Christ can be the second Adam for
men only if they belong to him in a material sense as they did to the
first Adam, and they do belong to Him materially only if he is not an
individual man like Peter and Paul, but the real beginner of a new
humanity. Cyril's view, moreover, was determined as a whole by the
realistic thought of redemption.137

The
Antiochenes, however, starting with the Jesus visible to history,
emphasized His resurrection, deliverance from the mortal and mutable
(the emphasis is here rather than from sin) being won for mankind by
the resurrection, and consequently they proclaimed Christ's perfect
obedience as freed man's example to follow. Both schools seemed to have
had universal concepts of the extent of the work of Christ138 as well as to
have believed
in the natural ability of men to accept that work and to work with
Christ towards their own perfection.

The
Alexandrian tendency was to contemplate the mystical nature of the
weaving together of the human and divine in Christ and in the
Christian, their inclination being to think in abstract terms of deity
and humanity, and the commingling of these "natures" in Christ, leading
to a subsequent deification of the humanity which in turn somehow
effects a mystical deification of humanity in general, restoring a
man's original nobility and possibility to grow to perfection.139 The
Antiochenes, however,
sought the Jesus of history in the gospels, their tendency being to
think in concrete terms of God the Son and Jesus the Man, the two being
united in one historical Person through whose resurrection victory is
gained over Satan and death, and men are called, through illumination
and imitation, to follow -to learn His way of life whose purpose is "to
lead all to imitation of himself"140
to perfection.

To
the former the presence or absence of a human soul in Christ was no
theological concern, this docetic tendency stemming from their concept
of the fusion of the Godhead with the flesh of man into one nature, one
center of self-consciousness, although in 381 they accepted the "two
natures in one hypostasis" formula, which to them meant two natures in
one being or person. Harnack speaks of "this perverse formula . . . The
proposition that before the Incarnation there were two phuseis,
but after it only one, is however, of special importance
for Cyril's conception of the Incarnation."141
To the Antiochenes the presence of a soul in the human nature of Christ
was an important theological concern, for the redemption of the whole
man, body and soul, required that the Saviour be a complete man, body
and soul, which resulted in their emphasizing two centers of
consciousness and two distinct natures, unmixed, in the one person,
Jesus Christ.

In
Alexandria the Logos-sarx conceptual framework developed (with
its implications that no human soul existed in Christ) the claim being
made that the divinization of the flesh made possible all predicating
of the words and actions of Christ to the Logos (the divine nature),
either as He is in Himself or as He is according to His humanity, an antidosis,
or communicato idiomatum, being held to have taken place.
On the other hand, in Antioch the Logos-anthropos formula developed,
with the emphasis that the eternal Logos is not the subject of the
human activity of Christ but that such activity must be predicated of
the man Jesus.

The
Alexandrian christological tradition held to two ousiai or
substances, human and divine, in Christ, one physis or nature,
in the sense of being, and one hypostasis or person, whereas
the Antiochenes held to two substances, two distinct natures, two hypostases
in the Nicene sense, (when distinguishing the natures) and one prosopon
or person (when considering the union), or two prosopa in
the sense of the personal characteristics of the two natures (though
never of two prosopa before the union or in abstraction from
the union of the natures)142
and one hypostasis or prosopon in the person Jesus
Christ.143
A fragment
from Theodore of Mopsuestia reads, "But if we consider the conjunction,
we speak of one person (and one hypostasis) ... If
then we try to distinguish the natures we say that the man is perfect
in his hypostasis and the God perfect in his. But if we want to
consider the union, we say that both the natures are a single
person (and hypostasis) and acknowledge that because of its union
with the Godhead the flesh receives honor beyond all creatures and the
Godhead fulfills everything in him."144
The bracketed parts are thought by some to be interpolation since the
formula "one prosopon and one hypostasis" is not otherwise used by
Theodore and also another quotation of this fragment omits them. If,
however, they do belong, as it has been said, "We have the Chalcedon
formula here for the first time in Eastern Christology."145

With
this understanding of the differing theological, especially
christological, traditions with which the Alexandrian and Antiochene
disputants approached the Council of Ephesus in 431, we are in a better
position to understand the significance of what transpired there, and
at Chalcedon 20 years later, to fix the Church's concept of
"Nestorianism" and attitude towards it. The Council was called to meet
at Ephesus on Pentecost, but John of Antioch failed to arrive. After
waiting 16 days, Cyril convened the Council in spite of the protest of
more than 60 bishops and the refusal of Nestorius and 48 of his bishops
to attend. With over 160 bishops in attendance, however, Cyril had his
letters to Nestorius read, one of Nestorius' to him in reply, and
selections from the Fathers chosen to rebut some six basic, disputed
propositions of Nestorius. The latter were that Nestorius separated the
Godhead and manhood so as to make of Christ two persons; he refused to
call Mary theotokos; he proclaimed that "the suffering and
crucified Christ is not the Logos"; he would not confess "that the
Logos, inasmuch as He assumed a body from Mary, was made man"; he held
that the union of the natures was by an external connection (by which a
moral union was meant) ; and his doctrine implied two sons, one who
assumed the man and another the man who was assumed by God.146 In these
points the Church's
concept of what constituted "Nestorianism" is seen.

On
that first day Nestorius was judged guilty of gross heresy, deposed and
excommunicated. Within five days John arrived and, on hearing the news,
set up his own Council, deposing and excommunicating both Cyril and the
bishop of Ephesus, Memnon. The emperor's representative, Candidian,
declared the Council of Cyril to be invalid and sent a report of the
proceedings to the emperor. Cyril too sent a report, which apparently
reached the emperor first, but with the arrival of Candidian's, the
emperor confirmed the latter's invalidation of Cyril's proceedings and
demanded that a collective Synod be held to discuss the dogma.

Meanwhile
the Roman legates arrived and in the interests of promoting the primacy
of their bishop persuaded Cyril to call another session of the Council.
At this meeting they stated that since the pope of Rome had already
pronounced Nestorius a heretic no other action was needed from the
Council but to declare its acceptance of this verdict. Hefele adds,
"They now gave, partly in silence and partly expressly, their adhesion
to the papal view."147

Bossuet,
however, points out that in the emperor's call for the Council to meet
in Ephesus it was specified that all previous actions against
Nestorius, which included the Roman pope's excommunication after ten
days of no repentance, be suspended pending the universal Council's
verdict, and that this will of the emperor was honored at Ephesus. The
evidence for this was that Nestorius had been called upon by the
Council, during its first session, to take his seat as a bishop. "For
this expression, `to take his seat,' is distinctly written; and it is
added, `in order to answer to what was charged against him'."148 Although the
Roman legates
made every endeavor to leave the impression that the Council was only
accepting the verdict of Rome on Nestorius, the fact is clear that at
the Council "a judgment of the Roman Pontiff concerning the Catholic
Faith, uttered and published, is reconsidered. What he had approved,
and what he had disapproved, is equally examined, and, only after
examination, confirmed."149
Cyril's Council, even in confirming the Roman pope's judgment, revealed
its belief that a universal Council had the authority to sit in
judgment on any ecclesiastical verdict, including the Roman pope's.

At
the last session of this Council of Ephesus, the Western Church's acts
condemning Pelagius and his ally Coelestius were approved. Hefele
points out that Nestorius

seems to have regarded as correct their [the
Pelagian]
doctrine of the sufficiency of man's free will for the accomplishment
of what is good; but not their view of original sin ... The sympathy
which Nestorius had with them is shown by his letter to Coelestius, the
well-known friend of Pelagius, in which he bestows upon him the highest
titles of honour, and compares him with John the Baptist, with Peter,
and with Paul, as the object of unrighteous persecution. "150

The Council also passed six canons deposing
any bishops who
would support Nestorius, or John whom they also deposed, but made no
effort to write a new creedal statement or to expand the old. The
stalemate was finally broken by the action of the emperor invalidating
both councils, imprisoning Cyril and bishop Memnon of Ephesus, and
placing Nestorius under house arrest. Desperate pleas were made to the
court for the former two men, and they were returned home at the end of
the summer, but neither John nor others seemed to take further interest
in Nestorius.151
He was
required to retire to his monastery while John and Cyril tried to bring
about a reconciliation between their two sees. This was accomplished in
433 by a Formula of Union which was an important step towards the later
Chalcedonian creed. It was prepared in Antioch, but approved by Cyril;
it clearly declared "a union of two natures took place," and that it
was an "unconfused union," the grounds of confessing Mary theotokos.
There was no "mixture or confusion or blending of God the Word with
the flesh." When speaking of the two natures as of one person it is
permissible to "interpret the God-befitting ones [phrases] in
connection with the Godhead of Christ, and the humble ones of the
manhood."152

Within two years Nestorius was banished to an
oasis in
southern Egypt where he busied himself in study and writing, preparing
a large book defending his position. Using a pseudonym, he called this
book The Treatise of Heracleides.153Cyril died in 444, and his successors fostered their interpretation
of his one nature union in a way he did not. The leading spokesman for
this monophysitism was Eutychus, an Egyptian monk, who "maintained in
effect, either an absorption of the human nature in the divine, or a
fusion of the two natures, resulting in a sort of a tertium quid."154 He held "that
His body was
not consubstantial with ours,"155
holding that the human attributes were assimilated to the divine in
Christ. His views were condemned by the Council of Constantinople in
448, but he appealed to Leo in Rome. Leo replied with a Tome
summarizing the Western christology, which was another important step
towards the Chalcedon formula. In brief, his statement declared that
the person of the God-man is identical with that of the divine Word;
the divine and human natures coexist in this one person without mixture
or confusion; the natures are separate principles of operation,
although they always act in concert with each other; and the oneness of
the Person postulates the legitimacy of the communication of idioms.156 This
formulation went a long
way to influence the Chalcedonian creed of 451 with its following
statement:

. . .in two natures,
unconfusedly [asuggutosl,
immutably [atreptosl, indivisibly [adiairetosl, inseparably
[achoristosl, (united), and that without the distinction of the natures
being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of
each nature being preserved and being united in the one Person and
subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the
same Son...157

Nestorius himself considered
that Leo's Tome
was an acceptable presentation of his own view,158
and in the last pages of his treatise he says of Leo that "he has
indeed held well to the faith."159
It is even believed that the emperor invited him to attend the Council
of Chalcedon. Sarkissian refers to a Nestorian source and says,
"Marcian had invited Nestorius to Chalcedon before his death."160 Another
reference to this
declares that a "Coptic life of Dioscorus claims that he [Nestorius]
was summoned to the Council of Chalcedon but died before the summons
reached him."161
Thus he
was not to learn of what he surely would have considered the ultimate
triumph of his views by those who again condemned his person. Loofs
quotes a fragment from one of his letters, now in the British Museum,
in which Nestorius declares, between 448 and 451, concerning Leo's and
Flavian's effort to condemn Eutychus the monophysite: "It is my
doctrine which Leo and Flavian are upholding ... Believe as our holy
comrades in the faith, Leo and Flavian."162
Nestorius wrote in the Bazaar as follows:

When the bishop of Rome had
read what had been
done against Eutyches, he condemned Eutyches of impiety. Now when I
came upon that exposition (sc. Leo's Tome) and read it, I gave thanks
to God that the Church of Rome was rightly and blamelessly making
confession, even though they happened to be against me personally.163

Chapter 6

Nestorius' Christology

What then did Nestorius believe
and confess?
What was his position, his christology, over against that of his
detractors? It was not that of their concept of "Nestorianism." His
great concern was "that no one should call the Word of God a creature
[in opposition to Arianism] or the manhood which was assumed
incomplete,"164
[in
opposition to Apollinarianism], and his fear was that the Alexandrian
formulation did not adequately protect the truth at these points. His
apology, the Bazaar, frequently refers to the charges of his opponents
and repudiates them. The editors of the English translation in their
introduction give an interesting summary of the charges:

1) He denies
that the unity of
Christ is a "natural composition" in which two elements are combined by
the will of some external "creator." 2) He denies that the Incarnation
was effected by changing godhead into manhood or vice versa, or by
forming a tertiumquid from these two ousiai. 3) He
denies that God was in Christ in the same way as in the saints. 4) He
denies that either the godhead or the manhood of Christ are
"fictitious" or "Phantasmal," and not real. 5) He denies that the
Incarnation involved any change in the godhead, or any suffering on the
part of the Divine Logos who, as divine, is by nature impassible. 6) He
denies that the union of two natures in one Christ involves any duality
of sonship. 7) He asserts that the union is a voluntary union of the
godhead and manhood. 8) He asserts that the principle of union is to be
found in the prosopa of the godhead and the manhood; these two prosopa
coalesced in one prosopon of Christ incarnate. 9) He asserts that this
view alone provides for a real Incarnation, makes possible faith in a
real atonement, and provides a rationale of the sacramentalism of the
Church.165

The charges for
which he was
principally abused and with which "Nestorianism" came to be identified
in the public mind, however, were these: a rejection of theotokos for
Mary, a distinction of the two natures in Christ to the point of making
two persons, two sons, and a consequent unwillingness to affirm that
God died on the cross (as if the One who died was not God the Son) ;
and basing the union of the natures on a conjunction or juxtaposition
due to a mere moral union. As to the first, we have already noted that
in his first letter to the pope of Rome he acknowledged the manner in
which the term theotokos could be used. The problem with
calling Mary the mother of God for him was that mother meant originator
or former, and this, of course, he could not say of her for the Logos.
He was willing to say, however, "God passed (transit) through
Mary."166
Indeed, in one
of his sermons surprisingly enough he did use the title theotokos.167

He did very
decidedly
distinguish the two natures. He disliked the communicatio idiomatum
concept as it meant to him the method of Apollinarius that
considered the natures fused together, or the substances becoming one.
Thus he insisted that the attributes of humanity must not be ascribed
to God, by which he meant the Godhead. This is the explanation of such
controversial statements as "I cannot term him God who was two and
three months old."168
Socrates, however, seems one of his few contemporaries who did not
think such statements a denial of Christ's deity. He wrote, "I have
already alluded to his faults, I shall in like manner be unbiased by
the criminations of his adversaries ... I cannot then concede ... that
he denied the Divinity of Christ."169
Yet, on the other hand, Nestorius felt that as much as possible the
ascribing of the attributes of either nature to the other nature should
be avoided by making both human and divine predicates of "one and the
same" Christ. He did this by avoiding the word Logos and using such
titles as Christ, Son and Lord, and making all predications of the one
Person by such a title, the title by which He was referred to in the
gospels. To Cyril he wrote, "You start in your account with the creator
of the natures, not with the prosopon of the union [i.e., the
appearance of the Christ of history]. It is not the Logos who has
become twofold; it is the one Lord Jesus Christ who is twofold in his
natures. In him are seen all the characteristics of the God-logos, who
has a nature eternal and unable to suffer and die, and also all of
those of the manhood, that is a nature mortal, created and able to
suffer, and lastly those of the union and the incarnation."170

Nestorius
preferred the title
"Mother of Christ" to that of "Mother of God" for Mary. He did this on
the basis that Christ was the one born. But to him Christ meant both
natures, so on his own presuppositions to speak of the birth of Christ
was to speak of the birth from Mary of the divine nature as well. Had
he not been so prejudiced against the doctrine of the communicatio
idiomatum he might have seen in it, used not as a means of
ascribing the attributes of one nature to that of the other nature, a
means by which to solve the predicament by ascribing the attributes of
either nature to the divine Person, the divine, incarnate Person being
declared the final subject in Christ. Such a formulation would have
enabled him to see that there was no need for making the denials, such
as the objection to theotokos, so obnoxious to the people of
his time, and possibly would have brought Rome on his side before ever
there was a controversy with the Alexandrian see, thus sparing himself
and the Church from the tragedy of Nestorius.

Nestorius
vigorously rejected
the idea that in the union of the two natures they are "together in
love and not in the ousias,"171
in other words he denied that he conceived only of a moral union in
which the two natures lived together in love, "conjoined to God only by
proximity and equality of honor and authority,"172
as Cyril charged. He replies, "Nor yet do I speak of a conjunction of
love and proximity, as in the case with those who are apart and are
united by love and not as to ousias; nor again do I say that the union
is one of equality, of honour and authority, but of natures, and of
complete natures; and by bringing together of the ousias I posit a
union without confusion."173

Cyril even
pretended to his
Egyptian monks, following the signing of the Formula of Union in which
he recognized two natures after the union, that this recognition, and
the position of the other Antiochenes, was quite different from
Nestorius' formulation. The reason for this was that the great majority
of his monks were monophysites, as they thought Cyril to be, and he
feared they might turn against himself because of his making peace with
the Antiochenes on the basis of two natures. (Eighteen years later at
Chalcedon both his fears and the Egyptian monophysitism were given
shocking support when the thirteen Egyptian bishops present refused to
sign the new creed with the cry, "We will be killed! We will be killed
if we do!"174)
So Cyril
explained the Formula of Union to his monks by claiming, "Our brethren
of Antioch speak of a difference of natures as recognizing, only and
merely mentally, those things of which Christ is known to be
constituted."175
That it
was only a mental or logical distinction of natures Nestorius denies
vigorously, for it was not one just in the minds of men but a real
distinction.

This matter of
the nature of
the union conceived of by Nestorius lies at the very heart of an
understanding of his christology, for after all, the basic charge
against him was that he thought of two persons, two prosopa, in Christ,
improperly distinguishing, or failing to unite, the human and divine
natures in Him. To see how he would conceive of the union we must first
consider the terms he uses for that which he would unite: the basic
terms of ousia (essence), hypostasis (substance to him), physis
(nature), and prosopon (to be understood in a different sense from the
modern use of the word person).

The term ousia
coming from the
verb "to be" (Latin esse) has a primary significance of essence,
reality, real entity as opposed to illusory. Grillmeier, in one of the
most lucid presentations of Nestorius' use of these terms says,
"Nestorius further narrows down the concept of `essence' (ousia) to
mean the `essential content' or `specific being' of the nature."176 Nature too
has a primary
meaning of reality as opposed to unreal, but natures can be complete or
incomplete. Body and soul are incomplete natures, but man is a complete
nature. What makes a nature complete and distinguishable from another
are its properties, characteristics and differences. The hypostasis is
the ousia "in so far as it is determined by the whole complex of
properties. Nestorius calls this complex of properties the prosopon."177

In
christology,
however, a different meaning presses into the foreground: prosopon as
the form, image, appearance of a nature. In this significance the Liber
Heraclidis, too, speaks of two "natural prosopa" in Christ. For
each of the two natures has its permanent individual determination, the
Godhead in the natural prosopon of the Son, the manhood in what
Nestorius describes as the "forma servi." The "natural prosopon"
has its reality from the reality of the nature whose mode of appearance
it is. But without the natural prosopon the natures are
incomplete, unrecognizable and indistinguishable. Thus the "natural prosopon"
is the complex of the properties, the differences and the
characteristics by which a nature is differentiated, limited and
finally determined. If two natures no longer preserve their prosopon
naturale, in their union they are no longer differentiated but
mingled. Thus "nature" in its "natural prosopon" is the "hypostasis."
In fact, hypostasis coincides with the natura completa,
but formally it describes the completeness of the natura completa.178

We
see then that
for Nestorius the prosopa are not two persons in the sense of
person as we understand that word, but are the sets of personal
properties which distinguish one nature from another, both alike being
rooted in the hypostasis and ousia as the concrete realities. Nor is
hypostasis "person" in our sense in his christology, but rather it is
the nature as expressed in its personal properties, the prosopon, the
mode of appearance. It is the prosopon which makes the ousia the
hypostasis, the complete nature. But the prosopa are identified with
the natures which distinguish the union, it always being thought of as
a union of natures. "Of what am I guilty," Nestorius asks, "who confess
the indistinguishable union of the two natures in one prosopon?"179 The
hypostasis is the nature
in its prosopon, but this does not make the hypostasis the Person of
Christ, for He was a union of two distinct natures in their prosopa, a
union of two hypostases, two ousiai, without confusion and without
mingling.

This
is
certainly not a "two-person" Christ in the modern sense of the word
person, nor even in the "Nestoriun" sense of the fifth century. Nor is
it an identification of person with nature as Nestorius is still
accused of doing in the following quotation: "Nestorius was as confused
as his master [Theodore of Mopsuestia] when attempting to account for
the existence of two natures in Christ. Both seem to regard 'nature'
and 'person' as one and the same."180
That Nestorius did speak of two prosopa related to the two natures of
the one person Christ is clear in such passages as this. "The
Incarnation is conceived (to consist) in the mutual use of taking and
giving, but Divine Scripture sometimes after the prosopon of the
divinity and sometimes after the prosopon of the humanity, names him
Son and Christ and Lord."181
But for him the prosopon of the union, the Person Christ, is
constituted through the union of the divine and human natures, each of
the natures in Christ making use of the natural prosopon of the other
nature. So he says, "The natures subsist in their prosopa and in their
natures and in the prosopon of the union. For in respect to the natural
prosopon of the one the other also makes use of the same on account of
the union; and thus (there is) one prosopon of the two natures."182 This has been
called
Nestorius' original contribution:

Nestorius'
own original contribution was the suggestion that, each nature
subsisting in its own prosopon (i.e., external, undivided
presentation), there was at the incarnation a mutual exchange of
prosopa resulting in the emergence of a common prosopon. Thus "prosopon
of the union," by which he in effect understood the historical figure
of the Gospels, was identical with neither the prosopon of the Word nor
the prosopon of the humanity but resulted from the coming together of
the two.183

The
core of the
problem of the incarnation is how to conceive of the union of the two
essentially different natures of God and man. Nestorius emphasized that
it was an intimate union and taught that the humanity made use of the
divinity, and vice versa. "In Christ the two ousiai penetrate each
other without confusion to form the unity of the one person ... It is
the mutual penetration of the two natures in respect of the prosopon
which he [Nestorius] takes as the ground of this unity."184 According to
Wolfson,
Nestorius envisages a union of composition in the Aristotelian sense
"of a bundle made up of individual things of different natures or
species - say wood, iron, [et cetera] ... When bound together into a
bundle, all these different individual things form one individual
thing.' Within that one, however, Wolfson says, the various individual
things still continue to exist in their own natures, though not as
individual things. "So also the two natures ... do not become one
nature, even though Jesus is regarded as one person; they still
continue to exist as two distinct natures within that one person of
Jesus."185
He contends
that the bond of union for Nestorius is the Theodorean idea of "God's
good pleasure," which, as we have seen, Nestorius denies. Wolfson
concludes, "Logically his assertion that the union is by God's good
pleasure really implies that Jesus is a mere man."186

Wolfson
himself
points out that "the union of the two persons results in a new person
... whereas the union of the two natures does not result in a new
nature."187
As Braaten
has pointed out,188
however, Wolfson seems to overlook this difference when trying to
interpret the union on the basis of the Aristotelian analogy.
Nestorius, to be sure, might recognize its appropriateness as an
analogy of the union of the natures, but not of the union of the
prosopa, for in the latter union it is an important conception for him
that the prosopon of one nature "makes use" of that of the other.
Nestorius constantly rejected the idea of two persons in Christ,
insisted on the union being one of two distinct natures in one Person,
Jesus Christ, a union which, though not a mixture or confusion, was far
more intimate than any mere moral union of love and proximity, and
declared that it was a union of such a nature that the attributes of
either nature can be ascribed to the Person Jesus Christ. It does not,
therefore, seem reasonable to conclude otherwise than that Nestorius
was not a "Nestoriun" in the sense his opponents charged and the word
Nestorianism has meant ever since.

In
his other
basic doctrines, Nestorius generally speaking followed the tradition of
the Antiochene school. He had a high view of Scripture infallibility
and followed the historico-grammatical method of interpretation. It is
interesting to note how he used the analogy of his christology to
repudiate Cyril's eucharistic interpretation, a forerunner of the Roman
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. He starts with his concept of
the coexistence of the two natures and two ousiai in Christ. He points
out that Christ did not say the bread was not bread, or the body not
body, but uses the terms body and bread as "showing what it is in
ousia. But we are aware that the bread is bread in nature and in ousia.
Yet Cyril wishes to persuade us to believe that the bread is His body
by faith and not [so] by nature: - that which it is not as to ousia,
this it becomes by faith."189
Nestorius held that Cyril's doctrine of the union of the natures
transmuted the human ousia into the divine ousia with the result that
the human ousia becomes just an idea, losing its real existence. He
sees a parallel in this to Cyril's doctrine of the Eucharist in that
Cyril seems to be trying to remove the real existence of the bread and
wine by an act of faith so that they are no longer bread and wine by
nature, but, supposedly, only such as an idea. "The view of the
Eucharist which is represented as that of Cyril's school, it is
evident, approximates closely to the doctrine of "transubstantiation,"
comments Bethune-Baker, "whereas Nestorius champions the view that they
remain in their own ousia."190

It
is
interesting to note also how Nestorius conceives the relation of the
doctrines concerning man and redemption:

Because
in fact He took this (likeness) in order to abolish the guilt of the
first man and in order to give to his nature the former image which he
had lost through his guilt, rightly He took that which had proved
itself guilty and had been made captive and had been subjected to
servitude, with all the bonds of dishonor and disgrace ... Those who
come (to Him) He persuades of their own will to depart from him
(Satan), and not against their will . . . God became incarnate in the
man through His own prosopon and made his prosopon His own prosopon . .
. that He might show all henceforth that whatever exaltation there is
comes about by (previous) condescension ... for our sake: that He might
be led away and die for the sake of our redemption ... it was necessary
that the incarnation of God the Word should take place for the whole
nature of rational beings, that we might learn to participate in His
grace ... that He might make men participate in His image ... in order
that he may be restored again to that which he was ... He bore even
death itself and paid for us the penalty justly due by substituting for
our death that death which unjustly came upon Himself ... He died on
our behalf as on the behalf of the deceived ... not that He might
obtain victory for Himself but that He might secure the exaction of our
own (ransom) and conquer not for Himself but for all men. For as the
guilt of Adam established all under guilt, so did His victory (or
acquittal) acquit all ... Christ has remained. . . that those who are
in Christ might comport themselves after the likeness of Christ, not
only by the grace of the Resurrection but also by the works and manner
of life of each of them; for the former is universal, but the latter is
individual.191

In
these
excerpts from several pages we can see something of his construction.
As a result of Adam's sin all humanity was captive to Satan and guilty.
The assumption of our likeness in Christ was to abolish this guilt and
restore human nature to the image it had before the fall. The typical
lack of differentiation between the concrete person of Adam, with his
nature, and the abstract nature of the humanity of us all is here. Men
now have a freedom of the will to come to Christ and to leave Satan.
The humiliation of Christ brings the exaltation of man,192 an idea basic
in Barth's
construction in our times.193
The death of Christ was for the redemption of all men, being a
substitution for the death of all. The ransom brings a victory over
death and Satan and the incarnation is "to show all" that "we might
learn" to participate in His grace of the resurrection and follow His
example of good works. The idea of a universal atonement, through a
substitutionary sacrifice of Christ, covering the original guilt of all
men, and of mankind's free ability to come to Christ seem to be the
motifs here.

The
Syrian-Persian Church's Concept of "Nestorianism"

That
the church
which spread east into Syria and Persia throughout the fifth century
held doctrines similar to those of Nestorius is apparent from their
earliest creeds. It was at the Synod of Mar Akakios, patriarch in 486,
that the following canon was subscribed: "It is the faith and
confession of us all, that there in God is one nature and three perfect
personalities (kenume), who are one true eternal Trinity,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit."194
In the Syrian prayer book there has been preserved another ancient
confession which deals with the natures of the Messiah. It reads in
part as follows:

One
Messiah, the Son of God, worshipped by all, in two natures. According
to His Divinity He is born of the Father, without beginning, before
time; according to His humanity born of Mary, at the fullness of time,
united with a body. His divinity is not from the nature of His mother;
and His humanity is not from the nature of His Father: the natures are
kept in their own personalities. In one person of one Sonship. And like
as divinity (Godhead) consists of three personalities (kenume),
one being, so is His Sonship of the Father.195

The
similarities
here to the teaching of Nestorius are apparent. Indeed, this same
church in an early writing states that the name "Nestorians" was given
to them by "the Catholics in the West," and that they thought of
Nestorius as "a very pious and good man" whose "doctrine is true ...
and who was unjustly judged ... but he was not the head of our church,
and we do not like to be called by his name, 'Nestorians,' for that is
not our right name."196
A
modern "Nestorian" writer, seeking to explain their christology, gives
the following description:

Now
there are three Syrian words commonly used ... : 1) Parsufa, (Greek:
Prosopon) which means a person ... (we confess) that Jesus
Christ has one parsufa, in the like manner as we confess in
the western church. But they [the Syrian churches] also teach that
Jesus Christ has two kejane or natures: the divine and human,
like as we confess. And besides, they teach that he has two kenuine
or as they say: `One person double in natures and their kenume.'
And it is this last word which causes the difficulty here in the
western Church [as it did also in the eastern in the early
controversies when Nestorius was excommunicated.] The question is.,
What did Nestorius and what do the Syrian Christians in our time really
mean by it? ...
They mean by the kenume of the natures of Christ about the
same as what we mean by 'personality,' i.e. the attributes, taken
collectively, that make up the character of an individual, that which
distinguishes and characterizes a 'person.' Rev. Wigram, M.A., calls it
a `set of characteristics.'197

That
this analysis of the "Nestorian" doctrine of the Church of the East
bears out the analysis of Nestorius' christology made above will be
apparent. The concept of kenume was not used in the Western
Church. There was no specific theological term for it in their
language, and no reference to it appears in their theological
discussions. To equate kenume with any of the terms appearing
in the Western discussions would be a serious mistake. Although the
Church of the East spoke of three kenume in the Trinity and
two in Christ they did not mean by this to identify two persons in
Christ. If they had meant that they would have used parsufa. They held
that in Christ there was only one parsufa, one person. When
using the Greek language, Nestorius did speak of the divine prosopon
and the human prosopon in Christ but that he was using the
Greek word in his sense of kenume and not ours of person is
apparent, for very forthrightly he denies holding that Christ is more
than one person. For him the prosopa (kenume), the personal set
of characteristics of the divine and human natures, unite in Christ in
the prosopon of the union. "The natures subsist in their prosopa,"
he declared.198

Of
the ancient treatises extant, the nearest to a confession of faith of
the Church of the East is the Book of the Pearl of 1298. The
following is from its English translation:

His Godhead is not from the substance of His
mother, neither
His Manhood from the substance of His Father; but the Natures and
Persons subsist in the one Parsopa of this one Filiation. And as there
are in the Godhead three Persons, One Self-Existent, so the Filiation
of the Son is of the two Natures and one Parsopa.199

On the tombstone of the patriarch Mar Shem'on
who died in
1538 these words are written:

And I acknowledged God, the
First Light. And I
confessed and believed in His Son Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect
Man, two Natures and two Persons--one Parsopa. And I loved His Spirit.200

Clearly they held to two
natures (duophysite),
each with its own personal characteristics (kenume, "person"),
in one Person (Parsopa), Jesus Christ.

The Verdict of Modern
Protestant Scholarship

Since the discovery of the
Syriac manuscript
of Nestorius' Treatise of Heracleides, and its translation
into French and English early in this century, there has been a decided
change of opinion concerning whether Nestorius was a "Nestorian" or
not. Grillmeier, a Jesuit scholar, admits that generally speaking "The
Catholic authors maintain a negative attitude" towards Nestorius'
doctrine.201
As we have
seen, however, scholars like Bethune-Baker, Loofs, Driver and Hodgson
and Seeberg all concede that he was not a "Nestorian." The latter has
even made the very strong statement, "In his christology there is
evidently nothing heterodox. It was only the usual doctrine of the
Antioch school."202
Prestige has written, "The orthodoxy of Nestorius is positive: with his
peculiarities of presentation once for all eliminated, the substance of
his doctrine was accepted as the faith of Christendom at the Council of
Chalcedon in 451."203
Kelly declares, "One thing which is absolutely clear is that he was not
a Nestorian in the classic sense of the word."204
Vine thinks it is possible to "develop from his a Christology at once
orthodox and powerful."205
Sellers concludes, "From all this it seems clear that Nestorius is
hardly deserving of the title 'Nestorian'."206
In his later work he argues that the two cardinal principles of the
oneness of the Mediator in whom there are "the two substances of the
Godhead and the manhood " are really basic in the christologies of
Cyril's Alexandrian, Nestorius' Antiochene and Leo's Western traditions
so "the Council of Chalcedon may be called the place where three ways
met."207
Grillmeier, torn
between objective scholarship and loyalty to the position of his Church
on the infallibility of its ecumenical councils, finds it difficult to
make an ultimate judgment on our question. He speaks of "the new
element in his [Nestorius'] writing, that more than anyone else before
him he utilized an insight, the method of which was correct, in that he
looked for the unity and the distinction in Christ on different levels,
the unity on the level of the prosopon and the distinction on
the level of the natures."208

Yet he would fault Nestorius
for "his
imprudence and lack of clarity in theological thought," while charging
Cyril with being too much motivated "by personal, church-political and
terminological concerns," and saying of Pope Celestine that he had
"insufficient knowledge of the true situation and the intentions of the
Patriarch of Constantinople."209
Then he writes the following of the Church's reaction to Nestorius and
his doctrine:

An investigation
was made to
discover all the consequences which this denial might objectively have
(a doctrine of two Sons, of two persons in Christ). All possible lines
were drawn to other heresies of earlier periods (Adoptionism, Judaism).
In this way an objective, impersonal picture of heresy was formed,
which was then assigned to Nestorius as its originator. All this
results in a "popular" image of a heresy and a heretic which chiefly
corresponds with the demands of the Church's preaching rather than with
those of historical accuracy.210
Grillmeier concludes, 'He
[Nestorius] could justly be supposed to be in direct opposition to
orthodox christology.'211
But he adds, `because Nestorius in fact sees the difference or
distinction in Christ only on the level of the two natures, he cannot
be accused of teaching such a doctrine of two persons in the strict
sense, at least, not as he himself intends it.'212

Concluding
Summary

Nestorius'
religious sense was
molded by his Antiochene education where the Aristotelian philosophy
was popular and the Logos-anthropos christology was
first formulated. Consequently he became a vigorous defender of the
complete humanity of Christ, man's Saviour, and opponent of anything
which might be thought to militate against the impassibility of the
Word. This tradition led him to react negatively to the title of theotokos
for Mary, an ascription he heard frequently used in his new parish
of Constantinople in 428. Being asked to mediate in a controversy he
found revolving around the use of the word that summer, he at first
only advised against it, recommending the use of christotokos, but
at the end of the year, in support of those advocating his position, he
preached sermons against using theotokos.

Those in
Constantinople who
came from the Alexandrian tradition, on the other hand, were long used
to the title theotokos. Their christology was held in the Logos-sarx
framework with its docetic tendency. Of the seven points of
difference in the emphases of the two traditions described earlier,
this Logos-anthropos versus Logos-sarx differentiation
was doubtless the most obvious. It was also the most basic, providing
as it did the basis for the Antiochene distinctive emphasis of two
distinct natures (with two ousiai or hypostases) in
the one person of Christ versus the Alexandrian hypostatic union which,
in the minds of most Alexandrians, meant two ousiai but one
after the union, with a communicatio idiomatum of the divine
nature to the human. This divinization of the human nature to all
intents eliminated it and thus produced the Alexandrian Eutichain
monophysite heresy.

Behind the
controversy which
immediately broke out over this matter, between the sees of Antioch on
the one side and Alexandria and Rome on the other, and the calling of
the Ephesian Synod which deposed Nestorius in 431, lay some significant
political and personal factors. The relatively new patriarchate of
Constantinople was viewed by Rome with some trepidation as a potential
challenge to its increasing claim to primacy in authority. Rome saw
very clearly the possibility of that patriarch's obtaining great power
through his influence on the emperor. This possibility was also an
occasion of jealousy for Cyril of Alexandria, who felt that
ecclesiastical leadership throughout the east should belong to him,
patriarch of its largest city and one of its oldest churches.

There is no
evidence that
Rome's christology differed from that of Nestorius, and in the whole
controversy the pope carefully avoided discussing that basic matter.
Indeed, Leo's Tome of 448 was held by Nestorius to be a clear
reflection of his own christology and in his later apology he praised
Leo for his doctrine. Yet the pope determined to exert the full power
of his position against Nestorius making the focal point the latter's
rejection of theotokos, even though Nestorius had written him
that he could accept that term so long as it was not used so as to make
Mary a Goddess. Rome's reasons seem to have been twofold. First,
Nestorius appeared to be setting himself up as a doctrinal leader of
the whole Church by challenging the time-honored concept of Mary as theotokos.
Secondly, Nestorius' friendship for and implied defense of the two
Rome-banished Pelagian leaders in Constantinople carried the
implication of the equality of his judgment with, if not its
superiority to, that of the Roman pope. Rome therefore used Cyril as
its instrument for the removal of Nestorius without ever revealing that
its own christology was basically similar to that of Nestorius.

The
"Nestorinanism" with which
Nestorius was charged at the Council of Ephesus centered in the
accusation that he so stressed the independence of the two natures in
Christ as to make two persons joined in a moral union. They held that
in his view the Word associated with Himself a complete, independently
existing man, an approximation of the adoptionist heresy. Christ was
thus a God inspired man rather than the incarnate God-man, with the
indwelling Son making two Sons, two persons, held together by a moral
union of "God's good pleasure" in Jesus Christ.

Nestorius
himself vigorously
denied that he was such a "Nestorian." He did not hold to two Sons in
Christ nor to a mere moral union, a conjunction of love and proximity.
He held that the characteristics of the two ousiai were their
natures with their separate prosopa, by which he seems to have
meant personal properties, in their mode of appearance, and that in the
incarnation a union of natures (synapheia) took place (which
may be understood as a "connection" or "juxtaposition" in the
Aristotelian sense) without mingling or confusion, but indivisible, in
the one Person, Jesus Christ. At the same time a prosopic union took
place on a different basis. The two prosopa united, but the result was
one person, the prosopa not remaining distinct as did the two
natures after the union. Nestorius emphasized that the union was of the
natures, but his new insight was to look for the distinction and unity
in Christ on two different levels, the distinction on the level of the
natures and the unity on the level of the prosopon.

The
characteristic of the
Syrian language to fail adequately to distinguish the abstract from the
concrete resulted in their having one word, kenume, to refer
either to the set of characteristics which identify personality
(personal characteristics in the abstract) or to the person concretely.
As the need for differentiation later arose, the Syriac parsufa (presence)
was used to denote clearly when the concrete person was intended.
Nestorius believed that Jesus Christ had two kejane (natures)
and two kenume (referring to each of the two sets of personal
characteristics of the divine and human natures) in one parsuf a
(concrete person). Nestorius and the "Nestorians" were duophysites
holding that Christ was One person with two natures, each nature with
its distinctive characteristics. Church theologians of later times,
including the Protestant Church, recognized clearly that each nature
had its own will, the duothelite concept.

Nestorius' early
negativism,
denying theotokos and declaring, "I cannot term him God who
was two or three months old" (by God he meant the Godhead), without an
adequate positive formulation was imprudent and disastrous. His
apology, written during his exile, called by his translators "The
Bazaar of Heracleides," is a positive attempt at a constructive
formulation and an answer to his opponents' arguments. Neither the
Syrian-Persian Church of the East nor modern Protestant scholarship
accept "Nestorianism," but neither does either hold Nestorius to have
been a "Nestoriun" or a heretic.

The closing days
of Nestorius'
life, when he realized that both Leo and Flavian, patriarch of
Constantinople, were contending against the Alexandrians for a
christology which was essentially his own, reveal Nestorius quietly
rejoicing for the triumph of truth but lacking the old truculence. The
last words of his book are very touching: "Rejoice for me, O desert, my
beloved and my foster-parent and the home of my habitation, and my
mother, (the land of) my exile, who after my death will guard my body
unto the resurrection by the will of God. Amen." He died a man
misunderstood by the Western Church, rejected by the Eastern Church and
unjustly condemned by the politics of both.

With this
understanding of
Nestorius and "Nestorianism" behind us, then, we must now go on to
evaluate their influence on the mission and faith of the first
Christian missionaries in north China by a study of the documents
written by those missionaries and preserved there to this century.

PART III

AN APPRAISAL OF
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE OF CHINA

Chapter 7

The Twelve Early
Christian Documents

During the past
half century a
total of nine early Christian documents in Chinese have been discovered
in northwest China; they, together with the famous stone Monument
inscription, make a total of ten Chinese Christian treatises to be
examined. In addition, two Syriac manuscripts dating from a slightly
later period than the last of the Chinese ones have been found. These
twelve manuscripts come roughly from five different periods in the four
hundred years between the seventh and tenth centuries and will be
introduced here according to the chronological order of their writing,
as far as that can be determined. Although the Nestorian Stone Monument
was not written until the late eighth century, reference to and
quotations from it will have to be made to help in the dating of the
others, since of all the documents it alone makes some effort to
present a chronological sequence.

The First
Literature -
Seventh Century

The earliest
group of documents
seems to include four coming from a period between 635 and 641, the
period when, according to the Monument, the first Nestorian
missionaries, led by Alopen, or Abraham, reached the capital of
Chang-An, later called Hsi-an. In what is probably the latest of these
four, and longest, "The Lord of the Universe's Discourse on
Alms-Giving," appears the following statement: "Though it is only 641
years since the time of the birth of the Messiah, consisting of 'the
five attributes,' yet (His name) is known in all parts of the world."213 The
significance of the
reference to "the five attributes" will be considered later, but here
we note a date that pinpoints the time of writing of this document.
This date fits in with the time given on the Nestorian Monument for the
arrival of Alopen's party, and the translation work done by them, as
described there in the following statement:

In
the ninth
year of the period Chaang-kwan (A.D. 635), he [Alopen] arrived at
Chaang-an. The emperor sent his minister, duke Fang Hsuanling, bearing
the staff of office, to the western suburb, there to receive the
visitor and to conduct him to the palace. The Scriptures [Christian
literature] were translated in the Library. (His Majesty) questioned
him about his system in his own forbidden apartments, became deeply
convinced of its correctness and truth, and gave him special orders for
its propagation. In the twelfth Chang-kwan year (638), in autumn, in
the seventh month, the following proclamation was issued ... let it
have free course throughout the empire.214

The imperial
record of Chinese
dynasties and rulers has been kept with great precision so these dates
of 635 to 638 can be assumed to be accurate, testifying as they do of
Alpen's arrival and translation work, before 641.

The other three
manuscripts of
this group seem to be linked together by notations at the end and are
doubtless the ones written prior to 641, that is, between 635 and 638.
The first of the three is "The Jesus-Messiah Discourse," the
second-longest of the four; it is obviously intended as an effort to
present the essentials of the Christian religion to the imperial court.
Starting with the necessity for revelation to know God, it proceeds
through a summary of the Ten Commandments, the virgin birth, life, and
sacrificial death of Christ, with the last part of the manuscript
missing. The astonishing feature is the extent to which the writer
relied on Buddhist expressions, perhaps another indication of the early
nature of this manuscript, revealing the new missionary's lack of
knowledge of the language and complete dependence on a Buddhist
translator. At one point "the Buddhas" are spoken of as seeing God in
Heaven, while the Chinese ideographs chosen to give the phonetic sound
to the foreign names are often rude ones whereas, with real effort,
noble ones could have been found, and did appear in later manuscripts.

The next
document which seems
to fit in with this group has no title, but at the end is written "The
Parable, Part 1I." Saeki has given it the title "A Discourse on
Monotheism" which appears to be what it is. The third, almost as long
as the first, is called "The Discourse on the Oneness of the Ruler of
the Universe, Part I," and like the others has much Buddhist
phraseology. The fourth, with the '641 date, covers the material in the
Sermon on the Mount and the highlights of the Gospels, and shows a much
improved understanding of the meaning of the characters chosen for
phonetic sounds. All four of these manuscripts, which are associated
with the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, were obtained in
China by two Japanese scholars in 1916 and 1922215
and are now in Kyoto, Japan.

The Cyriacus
Literature,
Early Eighth Century

The next group
of manuscripts,
also including four, is said by Saeki to be written by a Bishop
Chi-lieh early in the eighth century whom he identifies with a Bishop
Cyriacus whose name appears on the "Nestorian" Monument. In 1908 a
large find of manuscripts was made in northwest China by Sir Aurel
Stein. These are described by Moule in the following words:

It
is now well
known that a horde of manuscripts, which had lain for centuries sealed
up in a small room cut in the rock in the Ch'ien fo tung near Tun-huang
on the extreme northwest frontier of China, had been found by the local
priests near the end of the nineteenth century. Sir Aurel Stein was
able to bring away a large number of the manuscripts and these are now
in London.216

A
number of
these were Christian although apparently Stein did not take any of
them. A few weeks later Paul Pelliot of France came and took two to
Paris. Others were last heard to be in the hands of a private Chinese
collector. One of these is entitled "The Ta-Ch'in Luminous Religion
Discourse on the Origin of Origins" and has at the end the date
corresponding to 717. It is short but speaks of the Law-King sitting in
the city of Nazareth in the country of Ta-Ch'in. Another very short one
is called "Hymn in Adoration of the Transfiguration of Our Lord" and
has at the end a date corresponding to 720. Saeki points out that a
notation in the imperial records refers to "Chi-lieh, a Persian priest"
in the year 714.217
He
states further that the Nestorian Monument refers to Chi-lieh as one of
the noble men "who joined together in restoring"218
the failing cause of Christianity and that he was presented at court
with a new delegation of missionaries, the imperial record indicating
the year being 732.219

In
addition to
the above two documents, Saeki feels Bishop Chi-lieh (Cyriacus) wrote
two others. One is entitled by Saeki "A Nestorian Motwa Hymn in
Adoration of the Trinity," the word motwa being a Syriac "word
designating that the Hymn is to be sung while the congregation is
sitting."220
Moule,
however, has called it "The Chinese Version of the "Gloria in Excelsis
Deo'"221
of the Eastern
Church, following Mingana.222
It can only be said to follow the Gloria, however, in a very general
way, each line of the Gloria being expanded to a four-line verse. Yet
the theme of each line of the Gloria can be found in each verse. The
fourth of this group is called "The Discourse on Mysterious Rest and
Joy." Although relatively long it contains almost nothing of a
distinctly Christian nature but has the Messiah give Taoist teaching as
the way to rest and joy.

The
"Nestorian" Monument Narrative

With
the third
chronological period from which we have a Christian writing we come to
the famous stone Monument of 781; to its discovery and historical
elements we have already alluded. For a brief description of the
contents as a whole the following summary of Legge is good:

The
contents are threefold: Doctrinal, Historical, Eulogistic. The first
part gives a brief outline of the teachings of the Religion, and the
Ways and Practices of its Ministers; the second part tells us of its
first entrance into China, and the patronage extended to it for the
most part for nearly 150 years by various emperors; in the third part
to which, though it be the shortest, the two others are introductory,
the Christians express in verse their praise of God and their Religion,
and also of the Emperors whose protection and favours they had enjoyed.223

The
Book o f Praise - Tenth Century

The
last of the ten Chinese writings, according to Saeki, comes from a
period about a century and a half later. Its literal title is "Honor
Discourse," but Saeki has given it the name "The Book of Praise." He
sees it as the Nestorian Diptych, "since the main object of a Diptychs
[sic] or Triptychs [sic] in use of the ancient churches - the Eastern
and the Western -- was originally no other than to offer prayers and
thanksgiving for the living and the dead,"224
and this discourse calls for prayers for many deceased saints by name
and offers thanks for many books by name, including the second group of
four mentioned above. In a postscript there is reference to 530
Nestorian writings and to priest Ching-ching (the Adam of the Monument)
as the translator of thirty of them. Saeki does not believe, however,
that he is the author of this one since the T'ang dynasty is referred
to without the prefix "Great," an impossible omission if written in
that era. The T'ang dynasty ended in 906, and the stone cave in which
these manuscripts were found was sealed in 1036,225
so it seems to have been written at some time between those dates.

The
Syriac Hymns - Eleventh Century

The
fifth and last group of manuscripts are in Syriac. According to Saeki,
the later of them were found by Dr. Le Coq in 1905 in Kaoch'ang, China,
and represent sheets from a Nestorian Church Service Book, written
between the tenth and twelfth centuries.226
These particular hymns seem to be in adoration of Mary. In addition to
these sheets, photostatic copies of other hymns were brought to Tokyo
from the Peking Library in 1929. These are considered to be at least a
century earlier than the others.227
Prayers to the deceased saints for their help are frequent in these
hymns.

THE NESTORIAN MONUMENT

(Below the Inscription, partly in Syriac and
partly in
Chinese, are the notices)

IN
SYRIAC. In the year one thousand and ninety-two of the Greeks
(1092-311=A.D. 781) my lord Yezdbuzid, Presbyter and Chorepiscopos of
Kumdan228
the royal city,
son of the departed Meles, Presbyter of Balh, city of Tehuristan,
erected this stone tablet, wherein are written the disposition of our
Saviour, and the preaching of our fathers to the kings of the Chinese.229

IN
CHINESE. The priest Ling-pao.

IN
SYRIAC. Adam, Deacon, son of Yezdbuzid, Chorepiscopos; Mar Sergius,
Presbyter and Chorepiscopos.

IN
CHINESE. Examiner and Collator at the erection of the stone tablet, the
priest Hsing T'ung.

IN
SYRIAC. Sabran Yeshu, Presbyter; Gabriel, Presbyter and Archdeacon, and
Head of the Church of Kumdan and of Sarag.

IN
CHINESE. Assistant Examiner and Collator, the Presbyter Ye-li, Chief of
the Monastery, Director of the Sacrificial Court, and gifted with the
Purple Cassock.

--------------------------------------

On
the two sides of the monumental stone there are about seventy names in
Syriac of individuals, connected with the monastery or monasteries, of
various ranks, from bishop down to deacon, the clerical names in
Chinese of most of them being also given.

On
the latest rubbing also, and obscuring some of the Syriac names, there
is this note in large Chinese characters: `After its erection1079
years, in the ninth year of the reign Hsien-fang (1859), I, Han
T'ai-hwa of Wu-lin, came to see the monument, and, glad to find the
characters all perfect, I rebuilt the shed that covers it. Alas, that
my old friend, Wu Tsze-pi - the Treasurer - has not been able to
accompany me on the visit! I grieved long because of his absence.'

We
do not know who this Mr. Han was, nor what authority he had for doing
what he did; but the record of his visit shows the interest which
intelligent Chinese scholars still take in the monument.

Reproduction
of Syriac and Chinese names of missionaries and church officers at the
end of the inscription on the Nestorian Monument, 781. From The
Nestorian Monument of Hsi-an Fu by JamesLegge, pp. 30-31.

Chapter 8

The Theology Reflected in the Early Missionary
Literature

We
must now examine these ancient documents of the Christian missionaries
in China to see what we can learn about their theology. Is there
evidence that it follows the lines of "classical" Nestorianism, that
heretical view his opponents charged Nestorius with holding, or does it
seem to follow the orthodoxy of the Antiochene and eastern churches
which Nestorius professed to be his? In particular, we are interested
in their christological views, but, as in our study of Nestorius, for
background orientation and awareness, their views concerning the
Scriptures, man and his redemption, and the sacraments also need to be
considered before we seek to determine to what extent their theology
influenced their missionary effort or its final failure.

That
the missionaries had a very high view of the Scriptures and made great
efforts to translate and teach them is quite apparent. An unusual
witness to this is an imperial proclamation of 745 in which their faith
is referred to as "The Persian religion of the Scriptures, starting
from Ta-Ch'in, [with men] coming to preach and practise, has long
existed in the Middle Kingdom [China]."230
Speaking of the virgin-born Holy One, the Nestorian Monument of 781
declared, "He fulfilled the Old Law, as it was delivered by the 24 holy
ones," which Legge in a footnote indicates is a reference to the 24 Old
Testament books.231
Of
the number 24, as we know, "all Jews accepted only 24 books, our 39, as
Scripture. Those 24 included none of the Apocryphal books. This was the
canon of the Jews at the time of Christ."232
It was also evidently the canon of the early Christians in China.

The
same paragraph of the Monument which speaks of the 24 books of the Old
Law also includes this statement: "His mighty work being thus
completed, at noonday He ascended to His true (place). He left behind
Him the 27 standard books."233
Saeki in commenting on this raises this problem: "This is rather
difficult to harmonize with the ordinary view, for the Syriac churches
accept only 22 of our New Testament books. The Nestorians of East Syria
were slow to accept the four disputed general Epistles and the Book of
Revelation. Nor did these ever find their way into the Peshito [sic]
version."234
Hagenbach,
however, states, "Since the sixth century, however, it [Revelation] has
been in the Greek canon. Athanasius ... receives as canonical those
[books] we now have."235
From the evidence of the "Nestorian" Monument it is clear that the
"Nestorians" accepted the Scriptures as we have them today.

There
is no evidence of allegorizing the Scriptures, or of much use of
typology, but in the very first of their writings the Scriptures are
used as the very Word of God. In "The Jesus Messiah Discourse"
Christian morality is set forth with references to the commandments of
the second table of the ten and to the Gospels. "The Lord of the
Universe's Discourse on Alms-Giving" presents a summary of the gospel
revelation beginning with the Sermon on the Mount. In it is an accurate
quotation from Isaiah 53:7 and of the Great Commission from Matthew
28:19 and 20.236
Indeed,
one of the chief causes found for rejoicing in the concluding poem on
the "Nestorian" Monument was that the early missionaries brought the
Bible to the Chinese in their own language. There we read these lines:

The brightest and most brilliant of all
teachings,

The teaching of the Luminous Religion
[Christianity], Took
root deep and firm in our Land of Tang,

With the translation of the Scriptures And the
building of
monasteries.237

As for man, the missionaries spoke clearly as
to his original
pure nature and subsequent fall, after being created and given
dominion.

The original nature of Man was
pure, and void
of all selfishness, unstained and unostentatius, his mind was free from
inordinate lust and passion. When, however, Satan employed his evil
devices on him, Man's pure and stainless (nature) was deteriorated .238

Sin came through Adam: `Sin is
(of the nature)
of Adam ... That man [Adam] not obeying the commandment of the Lord ate
the fruit of that tree ... From the moment when he ate of the tree he
made himself (equal to) `the Lord'... he lost peace with God ...
Women's first predecessor in the world, credulously and carelessly
conveyed to Adam that lie which had been told to her and which brought
all the sins of mankind into this world.239

In the "Jesus Messiah Discourse"240 there is a somewhat similar
statement about sin's origin. "All the sins themselves have come to
this world, because our original ancestor committed the sin of
disobedience in `the Garden of seed-and-fruit bearing
(trees)'."--Commission of sin is now universal. "All the living beings,
however, have turned their face away from God and committed sins and
finally rebelled against the Lord of Heaven."241
But a day of reckoning is coming. "All the people in this world will
either be rewarded or punished ... If you do not worship (Him), then
you ... shall be carried to `the dark earth prison' (Hell) ... to live
together with the devil and demons forever."242

A nineteenth-century missionary
to China,
described as "one of the most zealous living missionaries," was asked
"to what he attributed its [Nestorianism's] failure. His reply was,
'How could it succeed? There was no Gospel in it'."243 This has been a rather
widely held view, but when we consider what the "Nestorian" documents
had to say about the subject of redemption it seems invalid.

Starting with the "Jesus
Messiah Discourse" we
read:

The Messiah gave
up His body to
these 'wicked men' to be sacrificed for the sake of all mankind and
made the whole world know that a human life is so very precious
[serving] as a candle light. Thus in love He gave up His life for the
sake of all mankind, suffering death for them.244

The "Discourse
on Alms-Giving"
elaborates the significance of the death of Christ to a still greater
extent.

What
the Messiah
did was all in accordance with what had been foreordained ... He did
the work of sanctifying transformation in a limitless measure ... He
did not open His mouth but remained so silent when He was examined and
He came to suffer the punishment of His body in accordance with the
law. Thus He suffered in love for you in order that the seed and nature
of Adam in you may be won and transformed by Him ... Behold! The
Messiah had arisen and departed! ... After this, those who came to Him
all went away filled with faith in Him. The disciples of the Messiah
understood clearly what to do and went forth into all parts of the
world [to preach the gospel]... Behold! Heaven opened and the Messiah,
coming into the transparent place of heaven, appeared in the sky. Up in
heaven there was a figure of man sitting with the Spirit of Great
Mercy. Thus the Great Sanctifying Transformation of all mankind was
done.

When
they were
given the Holy Spirit they had power to teach all nations and races of
mankind of the Messiah, and could make the whole of mankind to see
clearly the judgment of the Lord of Heaven. Behold! Who is this that
has come to this world from your Father and perfected the work of
sanctifying transformation?

For
our own
transgression and sins, from His own choice He made His own Person
responsible and suffered the death of His "five attributes of the
body." And in three days, He rose from the dead, and this was by the
power and strength of the Lord of Heaven high above ... Those who want
to be saved, hearken unto these words and do what is commanded ... If
there be any who neither delight nor listen to what is preached here,
they are in company with the devil. They shall be cast out into Hell
forever.245

In
the latest
Syriac manuscript also the theme of redemption appears:

The
Lord of all was pleased to renew our image which had, become corrupt
... The Good Tidings of reconciliation ... that men were to be freed
from the bondage of destruction ... Gabriel announced to the Virgin
Mary tidings of peace, saying: King Messiah is born in the mean
habitation and passed (his days) in the house of Adam (i.e., a mortal
man). He with His body cleanses all blemishes of His race and with His
bloodshed pays the debt. Blessed be the Father who sent His beloved Son!246

That
the missionaries had a universal concept of atonement appears in
several of the above quotations and again elsewhere as well. In spite
of such passages as the following, however, it was not a universal
salvation that they taught. "The Lord of Heaven Himself received the
bitter suffering, then beginning the raising up of humanity . . . He
then exclusively devoted Himself to the work of raising people."247 That they
believed in men
being eternally lost is clear from the quotations about hell, but the
universal nature of their concept of atonement appears in many places,
the following being some examples:

He, therefore, bore all the sins of mankind,
and for them He
suffered the punishment Himself.248
In His own death He was
hanged on high ... Thereby all men without exception might be raised
from the dead and ascend up to Heaven even as He ... The Lord of the
Universe has now been reconciled to all human beings.249 The wiles of
the devil were
defeated. The vessel of mercy was set in motion to convey men to the
place of light, and thereby rational beings were saved. His mighty work
being thus completed, at noontime He ascended to Heaven.250 (Or: He set
in motion the
vessel of mercy by which to ascend to the bright mansions, whereupon
rational beings were then released, and thus having completed the
manifestation of His power, in clear day He ascended to His true
station.)251...
He took
human form that through Him salvation would be made free to all.252

The atonement of Christ was thus held by the
missionaries to
be for all mankind; Christ's suffering for all paid the debt and
released all from bondage to the devil so all may believe, However,
their writings clearly indicate that for the missionaries Christ's
death for all did not mean salvation for all. Rather, His death appears
to achieve a gracious freeing of all men that enables them by their own
ability to believe and receive eternal life. Their theology at this
point seems to be a precursor to that of Wesleyan Arminianism by a
thousand years. The following quotations will throw further light on
this matter and their attitude towards faith and works:

Those whom the Lord of the
Universe gains to
Himself, He rescued them all from a state of misery.. . All the human
beings who have faith will come to the Lord of the Universe. If there
are any who have no faith in this, it must be said that because of
their unbelief their eye cannot see Him ... Those who have faith (in
Him) indeed will be taken to the abode of the Messiah ... Those who
have full knowledge of one God, and His right way [taught] in the good
Scriptures, and yet do not themselves do what is commanded therein, or
those who do not obey the determined will of the one God, still
continuing to do wicked deeds, worshipping the devil and demons or
Yakchas and Rakchasas, shall all fall into Hell together.253 Meritorious
deeds of giving things to others in charity can be done only here in
this world ... If you worship the Lord of Heaven with the utmost
sincerity all your sins will be forgiven ... He bore all the sins of
mankind, and for them He suffered the punishment Himself. No
meritorious deed is necessary. This man of boundless forgiveness has
already appeared ... Let a man worship this one God. Let him obey only
what is commanded by this one God. Unless you understand the meaning of
n meritorious deed in this sense, it is not a meritorious deed at all.254 A voice
sounded in empty space saying: The Messiah is my Son. All the people in
the world must do what is told by the Messiah, obeying His command to
do good ... If any living being should hear these words, let him give
up serving these false gods. Let him stop evil deeds, and forthwith do
good works in faith.255

Concerning the sacraments not a great deal is
said in these
documents. In the Monument there is a reference seemingly to baptism.
It comes immediately after the reference to the 27 books resulting from
Messiah's coming and appears to read as follows: "Admission to the rule
[i.e., the Way] is by the cleansing of water (baptism) and the Spirit
for washing away vain glory and for purifying."256
Four of seven of the English translations consulted inset the word
"baptism" in their translations here while all admit that to be its
reference, although a literal rendering would be more like "washing
water." "The Jesus Messiah Discourse" refers to the baptism of Jesus by
John to which Saeki gives this rendering, "He went to Yao-ku-bun (John)
and was immersed for washing."257
That the Church of the East practiced partial immersion and affusion is
the testimony of a missionary who worked in one of their last large
groups, in remote mountains, over a century ago. He attributed the
survival of this society of more than 140,000 to their location, which
he describes in these words:

The Nestorians of Koordistan
inhabit the
wildest and most inaccessible parts of the Koordish mountains. Some of
the districts occupied by them are so rough that no beast of burden can
travel over them, and even men find it difficult to climb about from
cliff to cliff.258

The claim of these people was that they had
faithfully
preserved the traditions of their fathers, their written language being
the ancient Syriac. His description of their method of baptism follows:

The ceremony of baptism (Umada)
among the
Nestorians, like most of their religious rites, is simple, compared
with the forms of other oriental sects. They have a room in the church
which is devoted to baptism ... The children are divested of their
clothing and annointed on the head and breasts, in the form of a cross,
with consecrated oil. .. They are then set into a vessel of tepid
water, which extends up to the neck, and held there by a deacon, while
the priest takes up water with both hands three times and suffuses it
over the head, repeating one person of the trinity each time... The
Nestorians observe no rule in relation to the age at which infants
shall be presented for baptism.259

The Nestorian Monument also has
a reference
which appears to be to the Lord's Supper. "Once in seven days, they
have `a sacrifice without the animal' (i.e., a bloodless sacrifice).
Thus cleansing their hearts, they regain their purity."260 In the last
Syriac
manuscript there are other references:

Behold! The body
and the blood
of the Holy One who pardons (our sins) are offered upon the Altar of
Life, in the midst of the holy congregation of holiness ... Thou hast
given us thy body and blood to eat, but our mouths tremble at thy name
... And make the living and the dead who have eaten thy body and drunk
thy blood to rejoice according to thy promise in the Kingdom.261

Perkins has
written of the
Church of the East's communion service of his day as follows:

Children
from
the age of three years, or younger, are allowed and encouraged to
partake of the elements, which all seem to regard as possessing a magic
charm, that willsomehow tend to prepare them for heaven, or
rather entitle them to it, without reference to any influence exerted
on their characters ... Both elements are extended to all the
communicants ... They do not worship them in the superstitious manner
of the Papists, nor hold to real presence in the Papal sense of the
term. They, however, appear to cherish a kind of homage for the bread
and wine which is not very intelligent nor scriptural, and
great particularity is observed in the preparation of these elements
... The consubstantiation of the Lutherans would very well define the
Nestorian belief in relation to their ordinance.262

When we come to
the doctrine of
christology and Christ's relation to the Trinity we find some very
significant statements in these documents. Concerning the Father and
the Son, for instance, from the earliest group of documents, in the
"Discourse on Monotheism," we have those statements:

There
truly
exists only one God from the beginning. Though He Himself is invisible,
yet there has been indeed two manifestations. For instance, there may
be likened to one's right and left hand,3 or legs. But there are no
such distinctions as before and after, or superior and inferior. They
are so alike that one cannot be distinguished from the other. Likewise,
one God (from) one substance and form sent forth one God . There can be
only one God in the universe, as there can be neither two nor three.263

The "Jesus
Messiah Discourse"
speaks of the Holy Spirit in relation to the conception of Mary:

The
Lord of
Heaven, therefore, made the Holy Spirit enter a virgin named Mary ...
Suddenly Mary became pregnant. This was done by the Lord of Heaven
because He knew that the virgin had no human husband yet, and because
He also wanted to show the whole world that without a human husband a
virgin can be made pregnant ... After her conception, Mary gave birth
to a son named Jesus, whose father was the above mentioned Holy Spirit.264

The "Nestorian"
Monument refers
to the Trinity in its opening paragraph and to one of the Persons as
well. The statement reads, "Is this not the mysterious Person (shen)
of our Three-in-One (san i miao shen) the true Lord
without beginning, A-lo-ha?"265
It is susceptible of other renderings so needs to be examined more
carefully.

There is general
agreement as
to the meaning of A-lo-ha. Legge notes that it is "the phonetization in
Chinese of the Syriac term for God, equivalent to the Hebrew (Eloah)."266Wigram,
the
historian of the Assyrian Church, states that "'Aloha' (sic) is the
name common to all three Persons of the Holy Trinity."267 However, in
the "Motwa Hymn"
we read, "Thou art Aloha, the Merciful Father."268

The problem lies
in how to
understand the word shen in relation to the Trinity. Does it
mean "Person" as one of the members of the Trinity, as suggested above,
or does it refer to the being of the trinity as Legge translates it,
"our Eloah, with His marvellous being, Three-in-One, the unoriginated
True Lord?"269
Since the
word shen in relation to God appears twice more in the
Monument and once in one of the other documents, it is necessary to
look at these.

The fourth
paragraph of the
Monument begins, as Moule, I believe, correctly renders it, "Upon this
the divided Person of our Three-in-One (san i fen shen) (),
the brilliant and reverend Mishihe [Messiah], veiling and hiding His
true majesty, came to earth in the likeness of man."270 The next reference is in the
opening of the poem at the end. "The divided Person (shen) appeared
on earth, redeeming and saving without bound."271
The only other reference is in "The Book of Praise," which opens as
follows:

Let
us
reverentially adore Aloha who is the Almighty Father and the Mysterious
Person; and Messiah who is the Almighty Son and the Incarnate Person;
and the Holy Spirit [in phoneticized Syriac] who isthe
Witnessing Person; these above Three Persons are united together in One
substance, (san shen -- i t'i).272

The
literal
meaning of shen, according to Wilder and Ingram, is "the body,
the trunk: one's self; personal; the whole life."273 To take it as "being," as
Legge does, and refer it to the Trinity does not seem to be as suitable
as rendering it "person" and understanding it as referring to one
person, "the mysterious Person" of the Trinity, an expression used for
the Father in "The Book of Praise." Saeki's rendering of the phrase, san
i miaoshen as "the Triune, mysterious Person,"274 holds to the
"Person"
translation but inappropriately refers to the whole Trinity as one
Person. The next reference to a Trinity member he translates,
"Whereupon one Person of our Trinity, the Messiah . . ."275 not rendering
the very
significant word fen (to divide, to separate)276at all,
other than
referring to the Person as "one Person." Legge renders this sentence,
"Hereupon our Triune (Eloah) divided His Godhead, and the Illustrious
and Adorable Messiah..." To this he adds the following comment:

Literally,
"our Three-in-One divided His body (or person)." I must take fen
shen actively as expressing the act of the Triune. The peculiar
dogma of Nestorius underlies the expression, - the dogma of "two
persons in Christ"; one of the many vain attempts to fathom "the great
mystery of godliness."277

This
active sense, however, does not fit the next occurrence of the phrase, fen
shen so well, although we see Legge here in his comment
recognizing "person" for shen, though then applying it to the
Trinity. The last Monument occurrence of fen shen has the
phrase fen shen ch'u dai (), which Legge renders rather
poetically "His separate Godhead, men then saw" and Saeki renders,
"Dividing His God-head, He took human form,"278
although the words mean literally "the divided Person (or separated
person) issued forth to His dynasty (or age)." These last two passages
Wylie renders, "Thereupon, our Trinity being divided in nature," and
the last, "Divided in nature, He entered the world,"279 taking the same phrase to
refer to different "natures" of the Trinity (taking "natures" as the
equivalent of persons) in the one case and to the divided natures of
Christ in the other. This, of course, has the weakness of
inconsistency. As for Legge's reading into this phrase "the peculiar
dogma of Nestorius . . . 'two persons in Christ'," it seems entirely
gratuitous, for as we have seen Nestorius never held such a view, nor
did the "Nestorian" churches.

Further,
Legge himself does not translate fen shen in his active sense,
"divided His Godhead," in the last Monument passage but renders it "His
separate Godhead," which construction is similar to "His divided
Person." That shen was intended to denote a personal
subsistence, a person, seems the best conclusion. It is unclear,
however, whether by fen the author meant the separate natures
of Christ or the separating act in which He left heaven to come to
earth.

In
the same paragraph of the Monument containing the second reference to
the Trinity, there is another mention of the Trinity without the use of
fen or shen, but with a reference to the Holy Spirit.
Legge translates it, "He [Messiah] appointed His new doctrines,
operating without words, by the cleansing influence of the Triune
[Three-in-One] [san i ching feng] []."280 As Saeki points out, ching
feng (pure or holy wind) is the equivalent of pneuma hagio, Holy
Spirit.281
If this above
sentence were given its word order translation, it could read: "He
appointed the Three-in-One's Holy Spirit, Silent (Wordless) Operator of
the New Teaching." Moule, Saeki and Wylie all do render Spirit here for
feng and, interestingly enough, at the end of this paragraph,
in the passage previously discussed as probably referring to baptism,
where we read sui feng () Legge translated "water and the
spirit"!282

To
sum up, then, it would seem that what Adam, the writer of the
"Nestorian" Monument inscription, is giving here, in the first three
references to the Trinity, is an introduction to each member
separately. The three passages would thus read as follows, taken in the
actual word order of the Chinese characters:

Our Three-in-One's Mysterious Person,
Originating True Lord,
Aloha.

Our Three-in-One's Divided Person,
Illustrious, Noble Messiah
...

He appointed the Three-in-One's Holy Spirit,
Silent
(Wordless) Operator of the New Teaching, Who forms in man the capacity
for well-doing through correct faith.

With
this understanding of the last passage we would doubtless have here a
reference to the unseen, regenerating operation of the Holy Spirit. It
must remain an unsolved mystery whether in the second passage the fen
gives us a clear reference, in the mention of the second Person of
the Trinity, to the Antiochene and "Nestorian" emphasis on the one
person Christ being divided (fen) into two distinct natures
(which concept then is repeated in the end poem, "the Divided Person
issued forth") ; or whether the fen refers to Christ as one
who separated from heaven to sojourn on earth.

The
interpretation of these passages in the Monument as being references to
the three persons of the Trinity is borne out also by the introductory
statement of "The Book of Praise," a later document, where, as quoted
earlier, the three members of the Trinity are referred to as "Mighty
Father, the Mysterious Person," "Mighty Son, the Incarnated Person,"
and "the Holy Spirit, the Witnessing Person," in each case the word shen
being person. The summary statement, previously quoted, which
immediately follows this description of the Trinity members, reads:
"These above Three persons (san shen) are united together in
One substance (i Vi)." This sun shen i t'i formula for the
Trinity is almost identical with that used in twentieth-century Chinese
theology to express the Trinity, san wei i t'i, where wei
is the most honorable classifier for persons and is used instead
of shen, with either phrase meaning "three Persons in one
substance." The "Nestorian" Monument and "The Book of Praise" would
thus give us a definite Constantinopolitan (381) trinitarian formula
and the Antiochene christology.

The
doctrine of the two natures in Christ comes out very clearly in the
second Syriac manuscript, where the missionaries were not hampered by
the effort to render their theology into Chinese where the religious
terminology was conditioned by Buddhist and Taoist nuances. His human
nature, for instance, is emphasized in these statements:

Behold! The virgin conceives and bears a Son!
And His name
shall be called Emmanuel ... For this day to you a Saviour is born from
Mary in our nature. The Messiah is born in the City of David ... Christ
was born with flesh and blood like ours.283

The
above is followed by such statements as these emphasizing His divine
nature:

Because it was impossible that He should
appear in the nature
of His Godhead, He put on our body and joined it to His essence... For
He is the divine Mystery who chose our Lady and dwelt in her, and made
the body one with Him by the partnership of His glory ... The good
tidings of peace [the angel] Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary,
saying: King Messiah is born in the mean habitation and passed (His
days) in the house of Adam.284

This
distinction of the natures does, however, appear in the Chinese
manuscripts in various places in addition to those already noted. For
instance, in "The Oneness of the Ruler" the Messiah's preexistence is
brought out. "In His previous existence He dwelt not in the womb. Hence
we know that He existed long before He was born from His mother's womb."285 Again, "What
He [Messiah]
did shows that He is not the seed of man. On the contrary, what He did
shows that He is the seed of the Lord (of the Universe)."286 In the
"Discourse on
Monotheism" the divinity of the Son is strongly asserted in a statement
obviously intended to refute Buddhist concepts:

Continual existence is non-extinction, and
continual
extinction is nonexistence ... This one God is of non-creation, and He
is of continual existence and of exhaustlessness. Wherever God is there
is His Holy Son always. Though invisible, this Holy Son indeed, is with
the One God throughout all time ... Each Person is Holiness itself, and
is, indeed, exhaustlessness itself.287

The
humanity of Christ is frequently indicated by the phrase appearing in
the following assertion previously quoted: "Though it is only 641 years
since the time of the birth of the Messiah, consisting of 'the five
attributes,' yet He is known in all parts of the world."288 The phrase
"the five
attributes" occurs many times in "The Oneness of the Ruler." The first
reference there reads, "Both the soul and mind are made up of `the five
attributes.' They, therefore, can see all, can hear all, can speak all,
and move at will."289
Again, a little further in the Discourse, the eyes, ears, nose, mouth
and hands are referred to, and then it is stated, "What is said here
about `the five attributes' is not applicable to what comes to
existence in the world except to what comes to existence in the
mother's womb."290
Speaking of the coming day of resurrection it is said, "Surely the soul
shall return again to the body consisting of `the five attributes'."291 From these
various usages it
would seem that the expression "the five attributes" refers to the 88

body
of the senses, the personal properties of which go to make up the human
nature. "A human being consists of both `the five attributes' and the
soul, forming one complete person."292

This
phrase of "the five attributes" seems to be a favorite way to refer to
the humanity of Christ, especially in His birth and death. In addition
to "the birth of the Messiah consisting of 'the five attributes'" noted
above, we have such expressions as these:

The Messiah suffered death in His body of "the
five
attributes".. . A flesh relation of "the five attributes" of the
Messiah ...

They at once went into the tomb and looked for
"the five
attributes" but found nothing.293

This
studied carefulness to designate Christ's humanity, or else His Person
as the Messiah, as that which is born, suffers and dies, is
characteristic of the Antiochene tradition, and is quite evident in our
two Syriac manuscripts also. There the equivalent of theotokos never
appears but the equivalent of Christotokos does frequently.
For instance, in the first manuscript we read:

The holy Virgin Mary, blessed among women, the
mother of
Jesus our Saviour ... The holy Virgin Mary, Bearer of Christ ... worthy
to carry in thy womb, Emmanuel. . . The holy virgin, the Mother of
Jesus, the Saviour of al1.294

In
the second document we have these statements:

From Mary, the Mother of Christ ... Mother of
Christ! Virgin!
Glorious dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit.295

Our
conclusion can only be that throughout these documents, on the basis of
this whole investigation, a picture of "Nestorian" heresy does not
appear, but only a picture of the traditional Antiochene theology. The
theology of these documents certainly precludes their having been
written by the Jacobite sect,296
some of whose people are thought to have reached China, for theirs was
the monophysite theology, and this error does not appear in these
manuscripts. The nature of the theology which appears in these
seventh-and-eighth century Chinese documents is that of the Antiochene
tradition of the fifth century.

Chapter 9

Reasons for the Ultimate Failure of the Mission

What
was the source of the missionary zeal of these early Christian
witnesses which brought them by foot across the thousands of miles from
Chaldee to China? Was it something unique in their theology? Because
their evangelistic zeal was so much more pronounced than that of the
rest of the churches to their west and because they were held to have a
different christology from the others, some may wonder whether it is in
their christology we can seek for the source of the missionary zeal of
the Church of the East. But as we have seen, there was nothing
particularly different in their doctrine of the person of Christ. They
emphasized that He was truly man, of our flesh and blood, but at the
same time that He was God from heaven, both the divine and human in the
one incarnate Person. But this was the orthodoxy of the Church
universal by the middle of the fifth century.

We
will have to look elsewhere for that source, and perhaps the answer can
be found in some implications of their Antiochene tradition. The
Eastern Christians were inclined to be activists, using that term in a
good sense to apply to those whose Christian faith led them to put the
emphasis on service rather than meditation. This activism stemmed out
of their Antiochene tradition of concern with particulars rather than
the theoretical. This outlook was in full conformity with their literal
approach to Bible study, even stimulating their detailed study of the
life of Christ in the Gospels that they might correctly follow His
example and do the good works obedience to Him required. The Gospels
closed with the Great Commission to take the message of Christ to all
the world, and doing this was seen by them as the climactic act of
obedience. The following quotation from an early bishop of Nisibis
summarizes this viewpoint:

He [the Savior] gave Himself in our stead,
that we should
imitate Him and give ourselves for the truth ... The Gospel calls us to
what is contrary to the nature of men and their characteristics and
manners, viz. love of enemies, doing good to those who wrong us,
avoiding all desires, denying every inclination, and giving oneself up
for the salvation of all mankind.297

If
it is true that the theology of the Alexandrian tradition, in Harnack's
words, "admitted no independent object to our present life; the work of
the Christian consisted wholly in preparing for death,"298 then it might
not be too
much to say that the real (i.e., consistent) outlook of the Antiochene
tradition and its missionaries was to consider that the work of a
Christian consisted in preparing for life, to lead the obedient life of
service themselves and to lead others into it and into life eternal for
the age to come.

The
missionaries' belief in a universal atonement, and the consequent
native ability of men to respond in faith of deliverance from death,
Satan and sin, doubtless encouraged many of them with a false optimism.
But they were convinced that Christians were called to evangelize! In
the "Discourse of Alms-Giving" they wrote that after the resurrection
of Christ:

[of]
those who came to Him, all went away filled with faith in Him. The
disciples of the Messiah understood clearly and decided distinctly what
to do; they went forth into all parts of the world, saying, "Preach ye
my words to all the races of mankind. . ."299

Taking
the Scriptures literally, they believed the fulfillment of this command
was vital to their obedience and going on to perfection. Following the
example of Jesus meant a sacrificial life of service, and the medical
schools of Edessa and Dschondisapur in Khuzistan,300 the theological schools of
Edessa and Nisibis, their hospitals and medical service, their
missionary effort in India and across to China, all testify to the
extent of their effort to render that service and to the extent of
their missionary zeal. Yet all of this effort was eventually to fade
away, and for reasons that went far beyond false optimism or a
misinterpretation of the extent of the atonement. Why then did they
fail?

In
an article in The Mainichi of Tokyo, Dr. Saeki has given what
he considers to be ten causes of their failure: 1) "Nestorianism" in
China was a foreign religion from the beginning and remained so to the
end; 2) the excellence of the Chinese civilization, material and
spiritual, was superior to that of London at the opening of this
century; 3) the fall of the Persian Empire in 642 was to the militant
Mohammedans; 4) the "Nestorian" church members in China were
foreigners, not Chinese, and mostly from the despised mercenary
soldiers of the Uigur and Tungu tribes, "barbarians" from the Mongol
plains; 5) in China they failed to train native leaders, lay and
clergy, as indicated by the "Nestorian" Monument where, of 72 names,
only one might be Chinese; 6) the loss of the imperial favor and
support occurred in the ninth century, with the outlawing of Christian
and Buddhist monasteries in 845; 7) the Huang Chao Rebellion, in which
many great cities were captured and their people slain, included the
decimation of most of the "Nestorian" remnant; 8) the monogamic
principle of the Christians was unpopular with the polygamic Chinese
and Mohammedans; 9) there was constant badgering and sometimes violent
persecution from the Mohammedans; 10) and the converted tribesmen in
the armies of the Mongul Khans died like flies as these mercenaries
fought the wars of conquest, or were lost through the sinking of the
invading fleet off Japan in a typhoon, while the eventual destruction
of the civilizations from Delhi to Damascus, under the ruthless
Tamerlane,301
decimated
masses of Christians.

All
of these are factors contributing to the failure of the mission to
found a lasting church in China, with the first, second, fourth and
fifth causes perhaps being especially responsible for the inability of
the missionaries to implant convictions which would survive the
disasters described in the others. Certainly the high cultural level of
the Chinese court, with the sophisticated philosophies of the Buddhists
and Taoists, along with the prevailing ethics, all constantly discussed
by the intelligentsia, presented a difficult barrier for these Syrian
missionaries to penetrate with the simple gospel. Starting at the top
level of society, as they did, and unable to win converts there,
doubtless had much to do also with their failure to train a Chinese
leadership, for the men were thus not available for training.

What
is probably the major cause for their failure, however, is one not
mentioned by Saeki, except in terms of culture under the second point.
The major mistake, and the one which ultimately doomed their mission to
failure, was their constant effort to phrase the gospel message in the
philosophical terms of the court, to make it intellectually acceptable
to that society, even though those terms had a strictly Buddhist or
Taoist connotation, thereby, to the extent it was done, lessening the
uniqueness of the gospel as the Word of the Holy God to sinful men.
Instead of the gospel's reaching those cultured but needy hearts with
the power, authority and unction of the living God, calling on them for
a heart conversion, its voice was muffled and confused when heard in
the terminology of pagan religion. Eventually, as we see in the last
manuscript in Chinese, the gospel itself was entirely missing, while it
is very little in evidence in some of the others, notably the long
"Discourse On Rest and Joy."

The
writings of the early missionaries of 635 show that they did have the
gospel, and obviously they wanted to communicate it, but they faced the
impossible task of quickly fulfilling the emperor's order for an
immediate translation of some of their doctrinal writings when they did
not have the language. Foster gives us a vivid picture of their
predicament:

We can imagine them sitting in the great
Library with their
scribes. The translator would find chapter and verse in His Scriptures,
and explain its meaning in halting Chinese to the clerk. The clerk
would ask for further light upon this point and upon that. Then, often
only half comprehending, he would write down what he thought was meant.
After each sentence or paragraph he would read his Chinese version. The
translator would try to check it ... Phrases bore a meaning different
from that which he intended, but they were unfamiliar, and he had to
accept them on trust. It was weary work -especially for the scribe,
whose heart was not in it. Once attention began to flag, all manner of
mistakes crept into the text. But the Emperor had commanded them to
prepare samples of their gospel, so however ill-equipped for the task,
they must proceeds.302

No wonder the later missionaries, in listing
the thirty
translated manuscripts in "The Book of Praise" for which they gave
praise, did not mention the first ones translated before 638! Those
later missionaries, however, with their superior knowledge of the
Chinese language and religions, were far less excusable for dimming the
light of the gospel with the wisdom of this world. In the "Discourse on
Rest and Joy," for instance, we read such assertions as this purporting
to be from Jesus to Peter:

Know you Simon Samgha [Peter]
that if any of"
you wants to prepare himself for "the Victorious Way," as a rule he
must get rid of both "motion" and "desire" before every thing else ...
If he is of "non-desire" and is of "non-action," then he may be pure
and serene ... understand and demonstrate (the truth) ... be all
illumining and all prevading. And to be all illumining and all
prevading is nothing but the concatenation of cause and effect which
will lead (people) to the state of rest and joy.303

Non-desire and non-action are Taoist terms
while the latter
ones are Buddhist. Lao-tsu, founder of Taoism, was known to have ten
heavy wrinkles on his face. In the continuation of the above passage we
find Jesus calling the attention of Peter to the "curious markings on
my face. But all these `ten streaks' may be assumed to signify my
attainment of wisdom . . ."304
Then shortly later, "If you cut yourselves off from the things that
defile you, then you could be as pure as the state of pure-emptiness
itself."305
The discourse
ends with these words, "Hearing too much may lead you into doubt,"306 a Taoist
concept but hardly
a Christian one! Both the Monument and the Motwa Hymn speak of either
the "Vessel of Mercy"307
or "the salvation raft,"308
of which Saeki says, "As far as the Chinese are concerned, it
corresponds to Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, who is called `the Boat
of Mercy' or `Salvation Raft'."309

Coupled with this compromising of the gospel
presentation by
the language used, there was another great weakness in the missionary
ministry. This was their readiness to take advantage of the
superstitious mind of the emperor and court personnel by using that
item in their beliefs which appealed to the pagan mind, and which
doubtless was the primary reason for their receiving the court's
reimbursement, that is, their willingness "earnestly to offer prayers
for the living and the dead," as the Monument puts it.310 Praying for
the dead is a
form of worship recorded in the earliest religious records of Oriental
peoples. Moore speaks of ancestor worship in China "at the most remote
time of which any record is preserved,"311
and points out that it was in India long before any transmigration of
souls was taught.312
Different motivations for praying to or for the dead have been present.
In some instances it is for the comfort of the living, in satisfying
their desire for continued fellowship with the dead. Anezaki claims
this is a common one in Japan.313
Again it is for the comfort of the dead, in some cases it being held
that such prayers "saved from the torment of revengeful spirits" in
hell, a belief in some Japanese Buddhism.314
Or with Buddhists, prayers for the dead are held to bring merit to the
deceased in their transmigrations and enable that the offerer "himself
will be led up more closely to the realm of bliss."315 But with a great many the
motivation is fear that the deceased spirit will make trouble in this
life for the relative who fails to pray to it, a common belief in
Japan. "If their wants were not supplied, they might avenge the
neglect," writes Moore of a similar belief in India.316

Of the "Nestorians," Latourette writes, "While
opposed to the
doctrine of purgatory, they prayed for the dead."317 Coleman says concerning
recent times that "while the Nestorians thoroughly reject the doctrine
of purgatorial fire, they still say prayers over the dead."318 These prayers
probably began
as marks of veneration for the martyred dead. In the latest Syriac
manuscript of China the purpose of the prayers to the deceased martyrs
is seen to be both to praise them and to secure their protection and
help. The opening sentence runs, "In the midst of our injuries, may we
be guarded by your prayers, ye Blessed Ones." Further on we read, "Be a
suppliant for all of us that we may be counted worthy of forgiveness."319 Among the
blessings listed
on the Monument as resulting from the early Christian religious efforts
we read, "The dead can have joy."320
The Monument also states that the imperial portraits were hung up in
the state-built monastery.

He gave orders to ... carry the
faithful
portraits of the Five Emperors and to have them placed securely in the
monastery, and also to take the Imperial gift of one hundred pieces of
silk with him. Making the most courteous and reverent obeisance to the
Imperial portraits, we feel ... the gracious Imperial faces are so
gentle... The Imperial tablets hung high in the air and their radiance
flamed as though vying with the sun. The gifts of the Imperial favour
are immense like the highest peak of the highest mountains in the
South, and the flood of the rich benevolence is as deep as the depths
of the Eastern sea.321

The five emperors were the immediate ancestral
predecessors
of the reigning monarch, and apparently the missionaries were well
rewarded for praying for them. "Seven times a day [i.e., at the
canonical hours] we worship and praise, a great protection for the
living and the dead," the Monument reads.322
Foster comments:

Without doubt one of the strong
appeals of
Christianity in ancestor-loving China was the message of a future life
and that the piety of the living could contribute to the peace of the
dead. Buddhists living side by side with Christians in Ch'an-An were
not slow to see that this was the most attractive feature of their
rivals. They were making preparations at this very time to compete with
Christianity in this regard by the addition of such practices within
Buddhism.323

The leader of this
[competitive] movement
within Buddhism was an Indian monk, Amogha Vajra, who lived as the near
neighbor of the Christians in Ch'ang-An. One of the Palace eunuchs, a
man of great wealth, had built a magnificent new Buddhist monastery in
the capital. It was here, in the year 766, that the completion of
Amogha Vajra's work of Buddhist "masses for the dead" was first
displayed. On the fifteenth day of the seventh moon a solemn service
was held, with prayers for the ancestors of the reigning dynasty
(763-780) seven generations beyond the Emperor Tai Tsung (627-650). The
portraits of the "Five Sages" already hung in the Nestorian monastery,
but they went back only to T'ai Tsung himself. The Buddhists were now
attempting to show that they could beat the Christians at their own
game.

Not only so, to this was joined
a "Feast of
Wandering Souls," a Buddhist All-Souls Day. Prayers were said and
offerings made on behalf of all who had departed this life without the
blessing of sons of their own to arrange the proper masses for them.
This feast continues still in ance3tor-loving China. A monastery may
arrange for similar ceremonies at other times whenever there are
well-disposed people to pay the costs. Thus they acquire merit for
themselves, and for these needy, lonely souls a speedier release from
Purgatory.324
A still
further development is seen in the "Pure Land
School" of Buddhism. Here there is a festival of masses for the souls
of the dead which continues for forty-nine days, ending in a day of
solemn feasting. There is little doubt that here we have the Buddhist
counterpart of the Nestorians' observance of Lent and Easter, known to
them in Ch'ang-An in the days when the chorepiscopos Yazdbozid [father
of deacon Adam who set up the Nestorian stone Monument in 7811
"assembled the monks for reverent service and proper worship to fulfill
the whole of the Quinquagesima." In China today masses for the dead are
one of the most popular features of Buddhism. It is strange to see
surviving there practices copied from the Nestorian Christian Church
which disappeared so many centuries ago.325

But these practices of prayers for the dead -
so utterly
foreign to original Buddhism where there existed no place for souls, no
prayers, faith, hell, nor a Pure Land Paradise (as man was held to have
no soul and nothing was held to exist beyond this visible world to pray
to nor to go to) - not only became the most popular feature of Chinese
Buddhism but revolutionized Japanese Buddhism as well. During the years
804-806 two Japanese Buddhist priests visited China to learn more about
their religion. Both lived in Ch'ang-An, and one of them, Kobo Daishi,
is known to have lived in a Buddhist monastery just a few blocks from
the mission compound.326
Furthermore, he returned to Japan with a copy of the very Buddhist
manuscript which Adam (Ching-ching) and the Indian Buddhist Prajna
translated together, until the emperor forbade them to work together on
the project on the grounds that neither knew the other's language
adequately, and each. should be solely occupied with his own religion.327 Saeki writes:

Prajna was still enjoying good
health and was
known by the title of "The Master of Tripitaka" in 804 A.D., and that
Prajna kindly presented three bundles of Patra-sutra, together with a
copy his "newly translated Satparamitta Sutra" in ten volumes, which
Prajna himself translated anew single-handedly in 788, after he had
separated from our priest Chingching in the work of translating that
sutra.328

When Kobo Daishi and his companion, Dengyo
Daishi, returned
to Japan, both began new sects of Buddhism whose basic tenets were new
to Japan yet soon became the most popular form of Buddhism. Dengyo
became the founder of the Tendai sect whose "comprehensive teachings
included esoteric mysteries, abstract contemplation, and faith in the
saving grace of Buddha Amida."329
From this developed the Jodo faith that the repetition of Amida
Buddha's name at death would bring assurance of rebirth in the "Pure
Land." Kobo founded the Shingon sect, teaching that "a person could
make himself identical with Buddha in his life by the performance of
mystical signs with the fingers, by the recitation of magic formulae,
and by meditation. He also believed that an esoterically adept person
could invoke the power of deities and assure by this means wealth,
recovery from illness, plentiful rain, good harvests, and other mundane
benefits."330
How much of
this did he get from watching missionaries make the sign of the cross
(as they did before they touched anything of significance), chant in
Syriac and pray for the living and the dead?

A Japanese scholar speaks of Kobo being "a
philosopher of all
absorbing syncretism" and adds, "The affinity or connection of Shingon
Buddhism with Manichaeism or the Alexandrian theosophy is a question of
great interest."331
With
the Christian worship so near it seems hardly necessary to pass it by
in order to attribute Kobo's new, syncretistic ideas to the Manichaens.
At all events, as the result of the new teaching introduced into
Japanese Buddhism by these two men, that faith became tremendously
concerned about life after death and the need of influencing the
welfare of the departed souls through prayers and offerings made here.
Indeed, today, holding religious services and prayers for the spirits
of the ancestors is considered by the average Japanese to be the main
function of Buddhism and the main task of the Buddhist priest. The
greatest religious festival of the year is the summer "All Soul's Day"
when the whole family offers prayers for the spiritual welfare of the
deceased ancestors.332

In that early day of foreign missions, the
causes which led
to the undoing of the early Christian effort were without doubt never
understood by them to be the seeds of their future failure. Faced with
the world's vastest empire at the zenith of its cultural, intellectual,
and governmental attainments, with the most sophisticated religious and
ethical systems with which they ever had to deal, with a people who had
long lived in the environment of religious syncretism, and with an
ancient language of which they knew little, it was no wonder that those
early missionaries should make many mistakes. The tragedy was that as
time went on and some of these factors changed, notably their knowledge
of the language, culture and religious concepts, they did not make a
more serious attempt to disentangle themselves from the use of
terminology and practices which make it increasingly difficult to
distinguish between the superstitions of the pagan religions and their
own rites. In modern terms it could be said that the missionaries'
concern to make their message understandable in the context of the
people to whom they went, accommodating their language to the religious
phraseology of the people, resulted in an overcontextualization, a
syncretism with pagan thought by which the uniqueness of Christ and His
Way was lost.

The heresy of the Christians in China was not
their
christology but their necrolatry. It was the concept and practice of
this which grew until it dominated their worship and consumed their
religion. Strange it is indeed that the mission which set out with such
vision, zeal, sacrifice and promise to bring life to lost men, should
end its day engrossed in prayers for the dead. But stranger still if
the profoundest effect the Christian mission to China was to have was
to change Chinese and Japanese Buddhism from its emphasis as a way of
life to a religion for the service of the dead!333
The missionaries set out with the glorious gospel of salvation through
Christ, God's Son, but faded into oblivion engrossed with superstition
and necrolatry. Today the ancient "Nestorian" Monument stands in the
Tang capital of the old Empire of the Middle Kingdom, tombstone to the
memory of a mission that failed. But let us who live never forget that
those early missionaries did leave their homelands and travel by foot
and horse some 6,000 miles of the wildest roads, in obedience to
Christ's command to take His gospel to all the world; and that their
failure still leaves that responsibility with us to fulfill the
unfinished task.

Concluding Summary

During the twentieth century nine ancient
Chinese
manuscripts, and two Syriac ones, all dealing with Christian teaching,
have been found in north China. Dates on some of them reveal they were
written between 637 and 641, while others indicate an origin between
717 and 720. The large Ta-Ch'in (Syrian) stone monument of 781, and
Chinese records, indicate that Syrian Christian missionaries came to
China during these periods and prepared manuscripts of their faith in
Chinese. These missionaries came from the Church of the East, and a
careful study of their documents reveals their Antiochene theology.
Their Bible apparently had the same number of books as ours today, and
there is no evidence of their having given it an allegorical
interpretation. Their documents present a clear picture of the creation
of man, his fall through Satan's temptation and all mankind corruption
through this fall. They believed in a substitutionary atonement;
although they also held it was a universal atonement giving all men the
ability to appropriate it and, through faith and the proper use of the
sacraments, to come to Christ for eternal life. In this they revealed
the thought seen to be in Nestorius' presentation. However, they did
not teach a universal salvation but sternly warned of hell for
unbelievers. They taught baptism by "water and the Spirit," the former
being practiced on infants by partial immersion and pouring. Their
concept of the Lord's Supper was not that of transubstantiation
although they seemed to hold a real presence of the Lord in the
elements with a cleansing from sin accompanying the reception of them.

The documents make it clear that their
doctrine of the
trinity was Nicene-Constantinopolitan. Their christology is seen to be
Antiochene, the Messiah being referred to as "the divided Person," with
both the human and divine natures being in the one person. The omission
of the title theotokos, and the use of Christotokos, also
point to Antiochene conceptions. So also does the frequent designation
of the humanity of Christ (referred to as "the five attributes") as
being that which was born, suffered, and died. The christological
presentation is thus "Nestoriun" in the traditional Antiochene sense
but not in the heretical sense condemned at Ephesus.

The Aristotelian concern for the particular
rather than the
abstract had left its impression on the Antiochene school of thought,
with the result that those stemming from that tradition were more
inclined to be activists than theoreticians, occupied with service, as
they endeavored to follow the example of Christ they learned from the
Gospels, rather than being devoted largely to meditation.
Church-centered schools, theological and medical colleges, medicines,
new vegetables for diet improvement, libraries, linguistic centers for
Scripture translation, written languages for illiterate tribes, foreign
traders and international envoys bearing the cross, all were fruits of
their Christian concern. Yet within a matter of centuries their labor
in China had not only ceased but had become almost unknown.

Many factors were responsible for this
eclipse, including the
difficulty of winning the cultured Chinese who, in their prosperity and
abundance of ancient religious beliefs, felt no need for the gospel,
and the severe persecutions which arose on several occasions. Yet as
important a factor as any, perhaps, was their temporizing with Buddhist
concepts in their eagerness to make the gospel intellectually
acceptable to the court elite, thereby causing it to lose its
uniqueness. To this must be added their necrolatry, which especially
appealed to the Chinese with their ancient ancestor worship. The T'ang
emperors of the eighth century were willing to finance the Christian
missionary churches in return for their prayers for the imperial
ancestors, a subtle temptation to conform to the court's wishes to
those who had little revenue and who wished to maintain a good
connection with the emperor. The record reveals that this work of
saying prayers for the dead eventually became the major activity of the
Christian presbyters, prayers being said seven times a day. Thus not
their christology but their necrolatry was the heresy of the early
missionaries in China; over the years it gradually turned them away
from their original labor of evangelizing the lost. The evidence
indicates that both Chinese and Japanese Buddhism were influenced
considerably by some of the Christian necrolatry which in time changed
these religions from concern with life to a major preoccupation with
the service of the dead. Thus compromise with pagan concepts was
doubtless the major cause for the failure of the first Christian
missionary effort in China.

APPENDIX

"Word and Deed" in Relation to Mission Purpose

"Word" and "deed." These two words as
descriptive of
missionary activity, that is, of the mission of the church abroad, have
been at the center of discussion in mission literature. There are those
who have equated "word" with the Biblical gospel and "deed" with the
social gospel. Others have thought of word as a spiritual ministry and
deed as a physical one. There is a not unbiblical sense in the latter
as Romans 15:27 indicates.

But can the terms be thought of as exclusive
of each other so
that one can choose a word ministry and not be responsible for deeds,
or vice versa? A more common recent differentiation is to equate word
with proclamation and deed with service. But is not one who proclaims
the gospel serving, and are not deeds a form of proclamation--a witness
to the love and concern of God? Proclamation in a general sense can be
verbal or non-verbal, as service can also be. Others have suggested
that we could consider word to mean the evangelistic mandate and deed
the cultural mandate. But, again, can either of these terms or the
mandates be thought of as exclusive of the other as if one could
consider himself called to engage in one without being involved in the
other?

One's understanding of the nature of the
church's mission, of
the purpose of missions itself, is reflected in his interpretation of
the terms word and deed. Many evangelicals have felt it adequate to
state the aim of missions as being the preaching of the gospel for the
saving of souls. At the other pole, others have claimed that the
missionary's true purpose is to work for social justice and cultural
advancement and that such deeds represent the essence of the
proclamation of the gospel. To this day this dichotomized understanding
of the nature of our mission confronts us.

The Aim o f Missions

As the ultimate purpose of all Christian
activity is the
glory of God, so the aim of missions is to accomplish His glory by
doing Christ's declared will in the mission endeavor. His will in the
fundamental area of the church's task is clearly enunciated by our Lord
on the solemn occasion when, just before he was to return to His glory
in heaven, He stood before His apostles. He had chosen them to be the
first officers and builders of His church and He commanded them then,
and through them all of us, to carry out the stipulations of His new
covenant. As Matthew 6:9-13 was given as a model for prayer, so Matthew
28:19-20 was given as the model for missions, the last proclamation of
the covenant of life. If the church had grasped this more thoroughly,
there doubtless would be today more agreement on the true nature of her
mission to the world.

That the primary purpose of the mission is to make
disciples is clear. This purpose is stated first in the mandate
and is an imperative. Until a man becomes a disciple of Christ, he
cannot be involved in what follows. To put it another way, until the
missionary, the sent one, sees disciples made, he cannot go on to the
rest of the task. But the mission does not end with the bringing of men
to salvation; rather it only begins there.

The imperative is followed with two
participles. There is to
be baptizing of the converts in the Triune name. This is the
work of the church's officers, of the institutional church, by which
either established churches are enlarged or new ones are planted. This
too is an important objective of missions.

But there is a third element in this mission
mandate by which
our Lord gives to us our model for mission endeavor. The second
participle calls for teaching the converts all that Christ has
commanded. This teaching goes beyond that of the stipulations to make
disciples and initiate them into the institutional church. Since the
mission was to go out into all the Gentile world, it would be to people
who would have to be taught all that God's word reveals to us,
beginning with the facts of His creation and His mission for men.

The Covenant of Life and Mission

The Westminster Catechisms speak of God's
covenant of life
with men, through Adam, before the fall (note Malachi 2:5 and Hosea
6:7). In that early revelation, particularly Genesis 1:28 (sometimes
called the cultural mandate) we are given the details of God's mission
to men for life; in brief, that men should be' fruitful (producing
God's seed), subdue the earth (bringing out its potential) and have
dominion for God (ruling for His glory). By these means they were to
live for God's service, for His glory. In the fall, men lost that aim
and in idolatry substituted the aim of glorifying their own
sovereignty. God's original mission for men has never been abrogated,
although made immensely more difficult because of the curse pronounced
on all creation, but obviously it was impossible of accomplishment for
those who remained in rebellion and refused to live for God.

The merciful introduction of the new element
of saving grace
into the covenant of life proclamation was for the purpose that men
might be redeemed and restored to God's favor and service - that they
might again respond in obedience to His declared will, His covenant,
and fulfill their mission on earth. Covenant here is considered to be
an arrangement proclaimed by the sovereign God of love in which He
declares His will to His people and binds them to Himself with promise
during a particular administration of His gracious rule. The first
proclamation of the elements of the covenant of life appear in Genesis
1 and 2, while the proclamation for the new covenant of life is given
in Matthew 28:19-20. (See "Theology of Missions, Covenant-Centered,"
November 22, 1968.)

The stipulations of the first covenant
proclamation, with
their summary of God's mission to men (Genesis 1:28) clearly inform us
of important areas of the teaching we are still enjoined to do by the
last covenant proclamation (Matthew 28:20). The cultural mandate and
the missions mandate are thus vitally related in the ongoing covenant
of life and in the latter mandate's stipulation for Christian
education, that is, its requirements to teach all that Christ's Word
sets forth. The writer of Hebrews, in calling attention to our
appointed mission (2:7-18), refers to Christ as the one who has come to
fulfill it for us. But we are called to be His disciples, to be
conformed to His image, to follow Him by endeavoring to bring all
things into subjection to Him, through His power, in gratitude to Him.
Thus we are called to follow His example by fulfilling the stipulations
of the covenant ourselves for His glory. The covenants between God and
man are not set in a specifically soteriological framework - that is,
they are not given to unsaved men to show them the way of salvation.
They are given to God's people to show them how to live and witness
before God's face in obedient service. Christ's obedient covenant
keeping, imputed to us, is our salvation in the Counsel of Peace (Zech.
6:12-13).

Our lives are to be involved in both spiritual
and physical
ministries. A Christian life involves both dimensions and service to
God in both areas. Paul's summary of his missionary activity under the
categories of word and deed reveals his concern in both directions
(Romans 15:18 and 27), Word and deed seem to be used to summarize his
understanding of the manner, the method, by which the mission his Lord
sent him on was to be accomplished. The evangelistic,
ecclesiastical, educational enterprise was to be the mission of
the church, but it called for a total commitment of both word and deed.

Word and Deed as Proclamation

Word and deed are both proclamation, for in
the general sense
proclamation can be verbal or non-verbal. The proclamation of the
gospel of Christ is the heart of the missionary's mission. The gospel
must not be narrowly construed, however. The gospel of Christ is the
good news of God's love toward man; of the Father's forgiveness and
acceptance by grace; of the Son's redemption from the power, defilement
and penalty of sin, received by faith alone; and of the Spirit's
conviction and empowering for the new life in God's kingdom, restoring
to God's fellowship and service forever. Proclaiming this gospel by
word is to verbalize the gospel (either by preaching or by witnessing
through the spoken and written word) with deeds in harmony with that
message; proclaiming it by deed is to demonstrate the gospel (through
physical help and deeds of mercy) accompanied by verbal testimony in
Christ's name. Deeds need words of explanation and words need deeds of
demonstration. In the Old Testament the one word dabar can
cover both, however. A dabar is a word, or it can be a deed so
eventful that it carries a message in itself. The Bible, however,
seldom leaves the deed "word" without verbal interpretation.

To proclaim by word is either to preach or
witness. Preaching
(as the word "herald" implies, II Timothy 4:2) is an official work of
the church, an authoritative work (Luke 10:16) . Personal, verbal
witnessing is a task of every Christian, including the preacher. Both
have as objectives fulfilling the three stipulations of the missions
mandate.

To proclaim by deed is a form of witnessing,
the non-verbal
form. Jesus said, "The very works that I do, bear witness of me" (John
5:36). Stephen in his death was a silent witness, but he had been a
very vocal one. A mere "presence" witness that deliberately omits the
name of Christ, or the presentation of His gospel, cannot be justified.
Admittedly the best occasion for the verbal witness is not always easy
to recognize and is a matter for prayer and wisdom.

The apostles are sometimes thought to have
chosen the "word"
witness to the exclusion of the "deed" ministry when they chose not to
"serve tables" but to give themselves "to the ministry of the word"
(Acts 6:2-3). The deacons were elected to supervise the physical
ministry of "serving tables." But Paul later was actively engaged in
raising funds for famine relief, a deed ministry, while at least two of
the deacons (Stephen and Philip) are seen actively proclaiming the
gospel, the word ministry! The word-deed differentiation was not an
either-or but both-and, with the word ministry being primary for the
apostles and the deed witness supplementary. For the deacons the deed
ministry was their appointed and primary task and the verbalizing of
the gospel their supplementary responsibility.

Objectives of the Deed. Witness

What are the immediate objectives of this deed
witness? For
one thing, it demonstrates that the Lord we serve is a God of
compassion, not just a fearful symbol, when it is undertaken with
integrity of heart. It thus opens channels of communication as rapport
and confidence are established by the display of loving concern. Jesus
said, "And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these
little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you he
shall not lose his reward" (Matthew 10:42). Again, "Whoever receives
one child like this in my name is receiving me; and whoever receives me
is not receiving me, but him who sent me" (Mark 9:37). Somehow
receiving a child in the name of Christ is to receive Christ, which is
to receive the Father who sent him. It is our mission, too, to
demonstrate that truth by deeds, as well as by words - deeds that come
from a heart of love. Orphanages, medical work, material relief,
schools - all are to that end when undertaken in the name of Christ.
When undertaken in one's own name, or that of one's institution, or
country, or humanity, or humaneness, the works, though good in
themselves, can be idolatrous.

The deed ministry also brings help to people
in need -
regardless of whether or not they are Christian. Jesus has told us that
if we are to be concerned for our brothers only, then we are no
different from the people of the nations to whom we go; but that if we
are to show ourselves sons of our Father, who does good things for the
rigkteous and the unrighteous, we must show love to all (Matthew
5:44-48). Paul wrote, "So then, while we have opportunity, let us do
good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of
faith" (Galatians 6:10) . Our Christian commitment requires in life,
before all men, this dramatization of the transformation the gospel
brings and the love and concern it engenders.

These works of Christian compassion are not
just acts of
pre-evangelism, as important as such works often are for preparing the
way for the verbalization of the gospel. Surely our Lord never intended
that we should refuse help to a needy man because at the moment it was
impossible to speak the gospel to him, perhaps because of a language
barrier. We are disciples of the Redeemer, and we too are called to
resist the evil effects of sin, to counteract the curse in His name,
thereby demonstrating something of the delivering potentiality of the
gospel (Matthew 11:4-6). When people who have had little of the
benefits of modern scientific discoveries, fruits of God's common grace
to men, are in real physical need, we cannot absolve ourselves of any
responsibility to them, as James has pointed out (James 2:15-16).

Our resistance to the effects of the curse
will sometimes
call for medical help when both the administration of antibiotics
(counteracting) and education for hygienic care (constructing) should
be undertaken; sometimes the need will be for agricultural aid when
weed killers (counteracting) and better seed (constructing) are the
answer, both to some extent illustrating the missionary's concern to
counteract the curse in the name of Christ and bring deliverance to
men. And sometimes what is required is the declaration of God's great
displeasure with injustice to the poor, inhumanity to widows and
orphans, lying and taking of bribes.

But always the goal of bringing to the fore
the good news of
the Son's redemption and the Father's forgiveness must be maintained.
In many cases it is the superstitious beliefs of the heathen, estranged
as they are from God and under a curse, that lead to their poor crops,
bad diet, unhealthy houses, high infant mortality, needless suffering
and early death. We are required, where we can, to do good to them in
the name of Christ, for it is a witness to His delivering power.

But our doing good is also to be "especially
to those who are
of the household of faith" (Galatians 6:10). The new converts among
primitive peoples do not immediately know a different and better way of
doing things. They need instruction and aid for their cultural tasks to
help them in their effort to subdue the diseases of nature which
overpower them, to overcome the soil and climatic problems which face
them but for which they lack the scientific knowledge adequately to
cope with or to surmount the disasters of nature which destroy their
fragile efforts of a lifetime. The early church appointed deacons to
serve in this physical capacity, but Paul also was very concerned to
gather relief for the saints in Jerusalem. The objectives of the
mission model's word-witness were to make disciples, build the church
and teach all of Christ's revelation; but the deed-witness also makes
an important contribution to reaching these goals and views them as
major objectives.

Some Implications Needing Consideration

In conclusion, it needs to be pointed out that
the above
understanding of the relation of word and deed to fulfilling the
purpose of a mission abroad has important implications for a mission
board.

1) There are implications for the choosing of
missionaries.
Ordained people have a word witness which is primarily verbal, but they
must be people with thorough training in the Scriptures and with a deep
commitment to a supplementary deed witness in which, through works of
love, the significance of the redemption of Christ is exhibited.
Unordained missionaries, however, usually have a deed witness,
primarily non-verbal, but behind their technical knowledge and
assistance must be strong desire and demonstrated ability to explain
the gospel, the supplementary responsibility of their task.

2) There are implications for choosing the
field. Should a
field be entered with physical help where there is no opportunity for
church planting or for taking the gospel to the people publicly? Should
a field be entered without an ordained missionary? It seems reasonable
to hold that where there appears to be little if any opportunity for
preaching the gospel to the general public, or for church planting, the
entering of such a field is worthy of consideration as long as a
distinctive Christian witness can be given by word and deed, whether by
ordained or by unordained missionaries, the hope being that this
initial situation can be improved to allow for the planting of a
church.

3) There are implications for choosing the
work to be done on
the field. In addition to sending ordained missionaries, a board should
be alert to acknowledge glaring physical needs on a particular field
and to seek unordained people with special gifts, zeal for witness, and
technological skills to help meet those needs in the name of Christ and
for the fulfillment of His mission.

Coleman, Lyman. Ancient Christianity
Exemplified: in the
Private, Domestic, Social, and Civil Life of the Primitive Christians,
and in the Original Institutions, Offices, Ordinances, and Rites of the
Church. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1875.

John M. L. Young was born in Hamheung, Korea,
of Canadian
Presbyterian missionary parents, where he received his grade school
education, later living in Kobe, Japan, where he graduated from the
Canadian Academy. He received the degrees of B.A. (1934) and M.A.
(1935) from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, doing his
thesis work in the field of the German Reformation. He attended
Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for two years and
graduated in 1938 from Faith Theological Seminary, then in Wilmington,
Del., to which he had transferred. That year he was ordained to the
ministry.

Mr. Young and his wife Jean Elder served as
missionaries in
Harbin, Manchuria from 1938 to 1941; he then served as organizing
pastor of a church in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. from 1942 to 1948; in 1948 they
went to Nanking, China, to continue their missionary work but had to
leave at the end of the year due to the communist take over. They moved
to Japan where in the next eighteen years he helped plant three
churches and was cofounder of the Japan Christian Theological Seminary
where he taught systematic theology and was president until 1966. That
year his wife died of cancer and he moved with his seven children to
Grand Rapids, Mich., where he finished a M.Th. degree at Calvin
seminary, writing on Christology. In 1967 he moved to Lookout Mountain,
Ga. to become Covenant College's Missions professor. The next year he
married a fellow faculty member, Jane Brooks, a member of the English
Department. In 1981 he retired and with their daughter they moved to
Japan to continue missionary work under World Presbyterian Missions of
which he had been president for three years. Since the merger they now
are members of the Presbyterian Church in America. Two of his sons also
serve with that church as missionaries in Japan.

While in Japan he was editor of The Bible
Times for
fourteen years, wrote his first book, The Two Empires in Japan (a
record of the Church-State conflict) and a series of ten booklets on The
Motive and Aim of Missions, since translated and published in
Korean as a missionary text. He also published a booklet on Karl
Barth's Doctrine of the Trinity and has had various articles
printed on missions and on covenant theology as a theological basis of
missionary effort. In 1961 he received the D.D. degree from Covenant
College and Seminary, St. Louis, Mo. He did his early research for this
book, By Foot To China, while studying the history and
theology of the early "Nestorians" during his studies on Christology in
1966-67 and then continued his research on the missionary activity of
The Church of the East as its missionaries advanced the gospel across
Asia to the Pacific.

FOOTNOTES

1 Note
the many references to the "Nestorians" in William of Rubruek's "The
Journey of William of Rubruck," translated by a nun and edited by
Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1966).

12 The form was used to affirm that "God was born" of Mary and was
objected to by many eastern Christians on the grounds if could imply
that the Godhead was born of her. Theotokos is frequently
translated "Mother of God." See chapter V.

14
See
Stewart,
Appendix A, pp. 330-336, for his explanation of why "a name of such
opprobrious signification" as Nestorian was given to the Church of the
East by Rome. Stewart argues convincingly that it was the Church of the
East's independency, a challenge to Rome's claim to the primacy of all
the churches and supreme authority, that led Rome to label the Church
of the East with the Nestorian name and its stigma of christological
heresy.

129
See Gibbon's
sarcastic description of "Saint" Cyril who lavishly spent over 2,000
pounds of gold from church coffers to influence the court and buy votes
at the Ephesian Council. (Vol. 11, 1560-1570). See also Nestorius, Bazaar,
p. 349.

130
Chapman, p. 756.
See also "The Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius," in Christology
of the Later Fathers, Vol. III of the Library of Christian
Classics, ed. E. R. Hardy and C. C. Richardson (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1954), p. 349.

152
"The Formula of
Union of 433," Christology of the LaterFathers, L.C.C.,III, pp. 356-357.

153
MacLean writes:
"The 'Apology' is called in the Syriac the 'Tegurta' of
Heraclides, and Bethune-Baker translates this 'The Bazaar of
Heracleides,' suggesting that the original Greek had emporion. But Nau
(p. xviii), with much more probability, urges that the original was
pragmateia, which may mean either 'trade' or 'a treatise.' It seems
that the Syriac translator blundered, and gave the word the former
meaning when he should have given it the latter. That pragmateia meant
a 'treatise' in Nestorius's own day is clear from the account in
Socrates, who uses this word when he says that Nestorius had very
little acquaintance with the 'treatises' (pragmateia) of the ancients."
p. 325.

191
Nestorius,
citing both from the Bazaar, in Driver and Hodgson's
translation (pp. 6275), and from Bethune-Baker's translation (pp.
124-137).

192
The "form of
God" humbled Himself, took on the "form of a servant" to live and die
for us, and by this humiliation we are exalted to "participate in His
image." Unlike Barth, however, Nestorius clearly tied the exaltation of
man to the exaltation of Christ also, for "the grace of the
Resurrection" is necessary for us to be "after the likeness of Christ."

213
P. Y. Saeki,
"The Lord of the Universe's Discourse on Alms-Giving," The
Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, p. 226. This book contains
the full texts of the ten Chinese documents and two Syriac ones, with
translations, and notes.

214
James Legge,
"Text and Translation of the Monument," The Nestorian Monument ofHsi-an-Fu (London: Trubner and Co., 1888, reprinted by New
York: Paragon Reprint Corp., 1966, p. 11. This book contains the full
Chinese text of the Monument with translation and notes.

254Ibid.,
"Ruler of the Universe," pp. 184-185. "Meritorious deed," kung de,
may mean no more than "good deeds," and Saeki himself so translates it
elsewhere in this very passage. The passage makes clear that no "good
works" are needed for forgiveness, but "faith" and "the blessing and
grace of God" only, and that deeds are good only when done in obedience
to Him.

296
Jacob Baradai
was the ecumenical (unrestricted) metropolitan of the monophysites of
Syria and Persia whose indefatigable zeal for thirty-seven years
(541-578) spread the heresy throughout the area (Schaff, III, pp.
773-775), monophysitism eventually even capturing part of the Mar Thoma
Church of South India (Foster, p. 35).

324
Since Church of
the East doctrine did not include belief in purgatory, the Buddhists
could not have acquired this idea from them. However, it is foreign to
early Buddhists also, while later ones may have acquired it from an
early trade contact with Romanists. Or it may have evolved from the
animist belief that souls of the dead wandered on the earth until
enshrined on some worshipper's altar, usually a family one.